Brad Watson

Your father, on the telephone before he passed, said gently, Take it easy on the booze, buddy, okay? That kind of broke my heart but not enough.

Joy Williams, one of the best fiction writers of her generation, has not enjoyed the broader audiences that have attended to (for example) Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, and Tim O’Brien. That said, she is recognized by…

The road to the coast was a long, steamy corridor of leaves. Narrow bridges over brush-choked creeks. Our father drove, the windows down, wind whipping his thick black hair. Our mother’s hair, abundant and auburn and long and wavy, she’d…

In a dense patch of palmettos about ten yards off the nature trail, she lay still and stared up at the broad, blue April sky. A Gulf breeze swayed the high tufts of thin longleaf pines, rustled through the small…