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Joy Williams, better than anyone else, is capable of finely capturing the complex and arbitrary, if largely mundane, situations life works itself into. Her manner is precise and unforced, her ear highly refined. Not much needs to happen in most of these, Williams just circulates around a few characters, their surroundings, the people who may appear around them, and perfectly articulates through a thousand incidental and semi-random instants, the feelings of loss and limbo that lurk at the peripheries of every experience. And then there are the stories where she does all of this and also manages to instigate a plot, not needed by her pure craft, but adding that extra layer of momentum. This is a bleakly perfect collection of incidents and intimations.