Greetings, readers! Now that Amazon has disabled its popular ebook lending feature, we're more committed than ever to helping you find the best ways to borrow FREE or save big on the Kindle books that you want to read. Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime Reading offer members free reading access to over 1 million titles, including Kindle books, magazines, and audiobooks. Beginning soon, each day in this space we will feature "Today's FREEbies and Top Deals for Our Favorite Readers" to share top 5-star titles that are available for KU and Prime members to read FREE, plus a link to a 30-day FREE trial for Kindle Unlimited!

Lendle

Lendle is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associates participant, we earn small amounts from qualifying purchases on the Amazon sites.

The first new book in a decade from the acclaimed author of “State of Grace,” “Escapes,” “Taking Care,” and “Breaking and Entering.”

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 "99 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 that is by turns comic and yearning and Kafkaesque. Kafka himself makes an appearance (talking to a fish), as do Tolstoy, the Aztecs, Abraham and Sarah, and O. J. Simpson. Most of Williams's 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:

"Have you ever had chicken pox?" asked the pharmacist.
"Of course," the Lord said.
"How did you hear about us?"

Herself the daughter of a minister, Joy Williams instinctively understands one sure truth about God: He always gets the last laugh.


PRAISE FOR “99 STORIES OF GOD”

"I would follow the trail of Joy Williams's words—always beautiful, compelling, and so wise—anywhere they led." —Chuck Palahniuk, author of "Choke," "Fight Club," and the Byliner Original "Phoenix"

"These modern fables and skewed vignettes make the implausible plausible. Compression, as done by Joy Williams, extends the reach of her stories." —Amy Hempel, author of "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom"

"Joy Williams's '99 Stories of God' reads like a blog-era bible as conceived by Borges, Barthelme, and Mark Twain. No writer alive captures the voices in the post-millennial psychic wilderness like Joy Williams." —Jerry Stahl, author of "Permanent Midnight"

"The word count of this slender, extraordinary collection belies the density and combustibility of its contents, their midnight hilarity and edgeless reach. Joy Williams is our feral philosopher." —Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize nominee for “Swamplandia!”

"Each story, like living tissue, is a reliquary that makes something splendid of our most secret agonies and desires." —Darcey Steinke, author of "Suicide Blonde"

"These stories are as full of surprises as a Noah’s Ark filled with mystical beasts, three of each." —Edmund White, author of “A Boy's Own Story”

"Like looking deep into the night sky, Joy Williams shows us that there are some answers we will never know. In that awe there is a transcendent comfort that many of us can only describe as divine." —Mark Richard, author of “Fishboy”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joy Williams is the author of such classics of American fiction as "State of Grace," "Taking Care," "Escapes," and "Breaking and Entering." Harold Brodkey called her "the most gifted writer of her generation," and Raymond Carver declared her "simply a wonder." She has also written several widely anthologized essays on ecological matters. Williams lives in Arizona, Wyoming, and Florida.

Genres for this book