Joy Williams is the author of four novels — the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 — and three earlier collections of stories, as well as III 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 lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming. Photo by Anne Dalton.

FICTION

Souvenir

By JOY WILLIAMS

“Most of the ghost stories in Cornwall involved ships and drowned sailors. And these drowned people, these ghosts, were always coming back, coming back to harass the living.”