The Pelican Child: Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award

A biting new collection of stories featuring misfits across time and space from award-winning visionary Joy Williams Lauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family''s deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.

• | Author: Joy Williams
• | Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
• | Publication Date: Dec 04, 2025
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• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781805228578
• | ISBN-10: 1805228579