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    Breaking and Entering

    Author Joy Williams
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    Paperback
    $17.00 US
    Knopf | Vintage
    On sale May 12, 1988 | 288 Pages | 9780394757735
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    From "a brilliant spawn of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor" (Elle) comes a novel starring an exhilarating cast of characters that reflects the search, not just for home, but for self.

    Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.
    © Jonno Rattman
    JOY WILLIAMS is the author of four previous novels--including The Quick and the Dead, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize--and four collections of stories, 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 Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming. View titles by Joy Williams
    “This compassionate and original book is about love and loneliness and courage in the new wilderness of out atomized society. It is also funny, awful and gruesomely Floridian without sacrificing its seriousness. Joy Williams is as fine a writer as you heard she was.”—Thomas McGuane
     
    “An ominous and enthralling novel .... truly significant fiction, of which there is not very much around. Breaking and Entering reminds me again that life is short; it is also very wide.”—Jim Harrison
     
    “To put it simply, Joy Williams is the most gifted writer of her generation. For her, the human personality is of most interest and most truth when it is under the most extreme pressure.... This notion of truth emerges in Joy Williams’s work in a complete Americanness of setting, language, and psychology that I find to be of great beauty and meaning.”—Harold Brodkey

    About

    From "a brilliant spawn of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor" (Elle) comes a novel starring an exhilarating cast of characters that reflects the search, not just for home, but for self.

    Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.

    Author

    © Jonno Rattman
    JOY WILLIAMS is the author of four previous novels--including The Quick and the Dead, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize--and four collections of stories, 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 Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming. View titles by Joy Williams

    Praise

    “This compassionate and original book is about love and loneliness and courage in the new wilderness of out atomized society. It is also funny, awful and gruesomely Floridian without sacrificing its seriousness. Joy Williams is as fine a writer as you heard she was.”—Thomas McGuane
     
    “An ominous and enthralling novel .... truly significant fiction, of which there is not very much around. Breaking and Entering reminds me again that life is short; it is also very wide.”—Jim Harrison
     
    “To put it simply, Joy Williams is the most gifted writer of her generation. For her, the human personality is of most interest and most truth when it is under the most extreme pressure.... This notion of truth emerges in Joy Williams’s work in a complete Americanness of setting, language, and psychology that I find to be of great beauty and meaning.”—Harold Brodkey

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