Concerning the Future of Souls

Name: Concerning the Future of Souls
Brand: Dreamscape Media
Availability: InStock
Author: Joy Williams
ISBN: 9781666666144

Author: Joy Williams

Narrator: Joshua Manning

Unabridged: 2 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Dreamscape Media

Published: 07/02/2024

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Religious

Synopsis

“Quite possibly America's best living writer of short stories.”—NPR “Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder.”—Catherine Taylor, The Financial Times Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which The New York Times Book Review called a “treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces.” Concerning the Future of Souls balances the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, as Azrael—transporter of souls and the most troubled and thoughtful of the angels—confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death, and his friendship with the Devil. Over the course of these ninety-nine illuminations, a collection of connected and disparate beings—ranging from ordinary folk to grand, known figures, such as Jung, Nietzsche, Pythagoras, Bach, and Rilke; to mountains, oceans, dogs, birds, whales, horses, butterflies, a sixty-year-old tortoise, and a chimp named Washoe—experience the varying fate of the soul as each encounters the darkness of transcendence in this era of extinction. A brilliant crash course in philosophy, religion, literature, and culture, Concerning the Future of Souls is an absolution and an indictment, sorrowful and ecstatic. Williams will leave you wonderstruck, pondering the morality of being mortal.

About Joy Williams

Joy Williams is the author of five novels, including The Quick and the Dead and most recently Harrow, five collections of stories, including Ninety-Nine Stories of God, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Paris Review's Hadada Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was elected in 2008. She lives in Arizona and Wyoming.

About Joshua Manning

Joshua Manning trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic and went on to perform on some of the UK's most prestigious stages including the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the National Theatre of Scotland. In addition to acting, he has narrated audiobooks for multiple publishers and is the recipient of a One Voice Award.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Tosh on May 14, 2024

This is my first Joy Williams book for reasons I don't fully understand. I have heard of her through friends, critics, and, most importantly, other writers who swear that she's the "it" in contemporary fiction. It took a free giveaway from Goodreads to get a copy of this book, and I think it was jus......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on September 20, 2024

Not as consistently stunning as "99 Stories About God," but lots of gems scattered throughout these provocative meditations on mortality and the afterlife, many of them hilarious. Worthwhile for anyone wise to the fact that Joy Williams is one of the greatest living writers.......more

Goodreads review by Ellis on May 21, 2024

Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams is a collection of micro stories layered between a narrative of Azrael and Lucifer—angelic colleagues in the Great Beyond. Through the stories we learn that Azrael is a mover of souls responsible for “transmigration from one body to another,” and Lucife......more

Goodreads review by Deborah on July 15, 2024

This can be viewed as a companion piece to Williams’s earlier Ninety-Nine Stories of God but works equally well as a standalone. Just as with the earlier volume, this slender book is a collection of 99 small observations, meditations, as Azrael, the angel tasked with collecting souls of all living t......more

Goodreads review by Brian on April 22, 2024

Joy Williams adds another grimly eschatological chapter to her withering survey of the terrible consequences the dialectic of enlightenment has wrought on the world. Both more recognizably “narrative” and more abstract than Ninety-Nine Stories of God, the book orbits around two mystical figures whos......more

Quotes

She’s the story writer of our time, choosing to shine light on the wreckage and the difficult choices that lay ahead: all we have to do is listen.