"The girls were rebelling. The girls were acting out. The girls had run away from home, that much was clear." -Rebecca Bengal In her collection Strange Hours, the writer Rebecca Bengal considers over a century of photography that has defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous and in-depth essays, profiles, reviews, and interviews, Bengal contemplates photography's narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin's New York demimonde to Justine Kurland's pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to several pioneering artists and the personal, political, and poetic stories that surround their photographs. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare's 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative early portraits in Brooklyn and explores Diana Markosian's cinematic take on her family's immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal's prose is attentive to the alchemy of experience, chance, and pioneering vision that has always pushed photography's potential for unforgettable storytelling.

In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. 'When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me ' New Yorker Books of the Year 2021 'This is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dali, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' Observer Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 LA Times Prize Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award Shortlisted for the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds a 'resort' on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call 'Big Girl'. In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction A Sunday Times Book of the Year In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. 'When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me ' New Yorker Books of the Year 2021 'This is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dali, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' Observer Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 LA Times Prize Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds a 'resort' on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call 'Big Girl'. In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.

'How to tell the story of a 500-page collection of stories spanning more than forty years? Especially when I really want to just exclaim, "Oh, Oh, OH!" in a state of steadily mounting rapture' Geoff Dyer, Observer Williams' uniquely devastating portrayals of modern life have been captivating readers and writers for decades. Here, for the first time, Williams' thirty-three best stories are available in a single volume, together with thirteen new stories that show a writer continuing to mould the form into something strange and new. Bleak but funny, real but surreal, domestic but dangerous, familiar but enigmatic, Joy Williams' stories fray away the fabric at the edge of ordinary experience to reveal the loneliness at the heart of human life. In 'The Lover', a girl suffers a spiritual and physical wasting away; in 'The Visiting Privilege', a visitor finds refuge in her friend's psychiatric ward; in 'Charity', a woman gives a poor family gas money and finds herself marooned in their peculiar world; in 'Another Season' an itinerant man cleanses an island of roadkill; in 'Craving' an alcoholic couple head towards a car crash. The Visiting Privilege represents the culmination of Williams' career and cements her place as the most singular artist of short fiction writing today.

The first collection of stories in well over a decade by a writer Ann Beattie has called "one of our most remarkable storytellers," and whom Bret Easton Ellis has named "the rightful heir to the mastery, genius, and poetry of Flannery O'Connor."
These twelve stories further Joy Williams's utterly singular achievement, described by the "Washington Post as "poetic, disturbing, yet very funny . . . the brilliantly controlled style informed by a powerful spiritual vision," and again reveal her ability to uncover, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in the "New York Times, "the somber verities lurking beneath the flash and clamor of daily life."
Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways-comic, tragic, unnerving-we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. And all of her characters are richly, idiosyncratically alive, in circumstances at once supremely peculiar and strangely like our own.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Fantastic Women comprises eighteen stories by some of the most exciting contemporary women writers in the United States. The daughters of Franz Kafka and Mary Shelley, the Brothers Grimm, and Angela Carter, these inventive, insightful authors steep their narratives in a heady potion of surrealism and macabre black comedy. The result is wildly creative work that captures the potent truth about human nature far more clearly than much of the fiction (or, for that matter, the nonfiction) being written today. Why just women? More and more women writers are creating work that not only pushes the envelope but also folds realistic fiction into an origami dragon, transporting readers into worlds we've never seen before and digging deeper into the psychic bedrock than their male counterparts. So slip into a pocket universe, drive through a family's home, awake in the night to find you've become a deer, and dive into the ocean to join your mermaid mother. We can't imagine ever wanting to escape this spellbinding world, but if you must, best leave a trail of crumbs along your way.

Williams tackles a host of controversial subjects in this collection of nineteen impassioned essays dealing mostly with humanity's abuses of the natural world.