When last we checked in with pastry chef Joy Williams, she was churning out cheddar cheese ice cream to go with apple pie at Russell’s Smokehouse for her job as the dessert pro at Wednesday’s Pie and ...

“The demands of living have consequences,” a haunted young mother says in Joy Williams’s 1978 novel, “The Changeling,” “and that is called fate.” The woman’s brother-in-law, a frightening man with ...

In my struggle to suitably describe Joy Williams’s “The Pelican Child” (Knopf, 176 pages, $27), I have turned to a line by Ms. Williams herself, from the book’s opening story, “Flour.” Here, a woman ...

The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’ fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection, “The Pelican Child.” ...