| The Quick and the Dead Contributor(s): Williams, Joy (Author) |
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ISBN: 0375727647 ISBN-13: 9780375727641 Publisher: Vintage OUR PRICE: $15.30 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2002 Annotation: Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old-the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles-and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity. " |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary - Fiction | Westerns - General - Fiction | Psychological |
| Dewey: FIC |
| Series: Vintage Contemporaries |
| Physical Information: 0.7" H x 5.1" W x 8.08" (0.57 lbs) 320 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: A Pulitzer Prize Finalist from one of our most heralded writers--the "poetic, disturbing, yet very funny" (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents--from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum--accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old--the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, in the company of C line, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood. |