Ninety-Nine Stories of God

By: Joy Williams

Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind's most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.

This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It's the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass - a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams' characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for him when he's standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he's in line to get a shingles vaccination.

At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.

©2016 Joy Williams (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Don’t assume this is Christian Fiction...

Both the sacred and profane intersect to no small degree of disquiet in Joy William’s sacrilegious collection of short fiction. I’ve seen bookshops that have erroneously tried to file it in the ‘Religion & Spirituality’ section. Anyone happening upon a copy there is in for a peculiar surprise.

One which will no doubt prompt a complaint or two from prudes.

On the other hand, if you’re at all like me, don’t let the ‘Stories of God’ part in the title put you off from the outset. This isn’t that detestable genre called ‘Christian Fiction.’ It has nothing in common with the fluff found in the checkout aisles of a Hobby Lobby.

It’s about the consequences of believing in Christianity—ramifications whether banal, semi-benevolent, or forebodingly sinister of a world where God exists.

Short short flash fiction.

Not for me. Won’t remember a single one of the 99. Uninspiring. Would much rather read a book of aphorisms.