Photo by Liz Williams
Winner of the 2005 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, The Woman in the Woods is an anthology of linked short stories set in New Hampshire’s mountain country, by author and teacher Ann Joslin Williams. Dramatic and personal, dwelling on relationships between man and woman, wilderness and humanity, the Woman in the Woods is a riveting portrayal of forces both within the self and larger than oneself, as well as the sheer beauty of the natural world. “The woman takes a different trail down. It’s a sharp decent over sheer granite, until the trail hits a straightaway through dwarf spruce, and meanders along the easy ridge to Firescrew. Up close, the white braids of quartz woven into the granite are tinged with rust-colored veins. The plateau has more growth than she remembered. Yellow grasses, fine and tall with delicate feathery seeds; junipers and low blueberry bushes everywhere.” Highly recommended.
--The Midwest Book Review |
The Woman in the Woods
Ann Joslin Williams’s writing is authentic, hard-won and amazingly effective. Her stories will work their way into your heart like shards of migrating iron. They are true and artful – I admire them for how the stitch of words recedes, and the people inside emerge. The Woman in the Woods is the most courageous collection I’ve seen in a long time. --Robert Olmstead author of Stay Here With Me What I admire about Ann Joslin Williams is the generosity of her affections, the richness of her landscapes, and the easy grace of her prose. The stories in The Woman in the Woods are like tiles that slowly fit together to create the portrait of a grief that flows down through the generations, obscured sometimes by love and by pleasure, but never completely forgotten. The book is richly populated with men and women, adults and children, and the souls of those both living and dead---all of whom, like Dante, seem to have come to themselves within a dark wood where the straight way has been lost. --Kevin Brockmeier author of A Brief History of the Dead These stories move with the inexorable pull of a river, carrying us through cycles of love and loss, grief and hope, with such clear-eyed honesty that we come to feel the characters’ emotions as our own. Williams is a brilliant observer of the natural world—not only of the patterns of weather and the changes of Northeast flora and fauna, but also of the forces that bring us together and pull us apart. The Woman in the Woods marks the debut of a wise and beautiful voice in American fiction, one that will stand as a powerful new presence in our literary landscape. --Julie Orringer author of How To Breathe Underwater Children and mating and rivers and rejoicing and farewells—The Woman in the Woods is made from the living, turning textures of family passions and despair, as years pass and they cherish and renew themselves, as families do. Ann Joslin Williams tells us an emotionally demanding and beautiful, if occasionally heartbreaking, story of the sort that gives an old fellow heart. I both suffered and loved it. —William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Willow Field |
|