Author
The Pelican Child
The Pelican Child is Joy Williams's seventh collection of short fiction, published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2025. The twelve stories, most previously published in literary journals, gather Williams's signature fusion of the mundane and the mythic: talking dogs at a writers' retreat, a Slavic folkloric figure meeting John James Audubon, twin sisters plotting ecological retribution in Wyoming, and a man's mother receiving his terminal diagnosis with a koan. The collection is unified by its preoccupation with mortality, the slow unraveling of the natural world, and the uncanny quality that hides inside ordinary American life. Characters drift through a diminished landscape where care homes replace family photos with stock images, where lakes are drying, and where the boundary between the living and the dead remains stubbornly porous. The book was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award and received broadly favorable critical attention.