The Changeling

With a new introduction by Karen Russell the 40th anniversary edition of The Changeling is a visionary fairy tale and a work of mythic genius by one of our best writers. Forty years later The Changeling is no less haunting and no less visionary than the day it was published but it has only become clearer that Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinkera genius in every sense of the word. When we first meet Pearlyoung in years but advanced in her drinkingshes on the lam sitting at a hotel bar in Florida throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief and the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband and the Northeastern island his family calls home doesnt last for long. Soon shes being shepherded back. The island for Pearl is a place of madness and pain and her round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter. And through this lensPearls fragile consciousnessreaders encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood in a new light. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy the plainspoken and the poetic Joy Williams has blended as Rick Moody writes the arresting improbabilities of magic realism with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.