Fiction: 5.3x8.5
208 Pages, ..................

ISBN: 1-59766-019-1
Paper: $14.95

What I admire about Ann Joslin Williams is the generosity of her affections, the richness of her landscapes, and the easy grace of her prose. The stories in The Woman in the Woods are like tiles that slowly fit together to create the portrait of a grief that flows down through the generations, obscured sometimes by love and by pleasure, but never completely forgotten. The book is richly populated with men and women, adults and children, and the souls of those both living and dead—all of whom, like Dante, seem to have come to themselves within a dark wood where the straight way has been lost.

—Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Brief History of the Dead

These stories move with the inexorable pull of a river, carrying us through cycles of love and loss, grief and hope, with such clear-eyed honesty that we come to feel the characters’ emotions as our own. Williams is a brilliant observer of the natural world—not only of the patterns of weather and the changes of Northeast flora and fauna, but also of the forces that bring us together and pull us apart. The Woman in the Woods marks the debut of a wise and beautiful voice in American fiction, one that will stand as a powerful new presence in our literary landscape.

—Julie Orringer, author of How to Breathe Underwater

Ann Joslin Williams holds degrees from the University of New Hampshire and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching Writing Fellow. She is also the recipient of fellowships from Stanford University ’s Wallace Stegner Program and from the Vermont Studio Center . Her work has appeared in many journals, including  The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review , StoryQuarterly, and  Ploughshares , and one of her stories was cited in Best American Short Stories, 2002, as one of a hundred outstanding stories of 2001. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts.

Ann Joslin Williams’s writing is authentic, hard-won, and amazingly effective. Her stories will work their way into your heart like shards of migrating iron. They are true and artful—I admire them for how the stitch of words recedes and the people inside emerge. The Woman in the Woods is the most courageous collection I’ve seen in a long time.

—Robert Olmstead, author of Stay Here with Me

Children and mating and rivers and rejoicing and farewells—The Woman in the Woods is made from the living, turning textures of family passions and despair, as years pass and they cherish and renew themselves, as families do. Ann Joslin Williams tells us an emotionally demanding and beautiful, if occasionally heartbreaking, story. . . . I both suffered and loved it.

—William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field