“Save the Whale, Screw the Shrimp”: A Conversation with Joy Williams

“What a short story is, is dishonesty. It pretends to be transparent and straightforward. It’s about ordinary people, ordinary things, recognizable things. But all of this is a masquerade. Good short stories are about the terrible and incomprehensible aspects of time, about the dark grip of old disasters,” American author Joy Williams once said in an interview. She is admired by writers such as Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Karen Russell, Bret Easton Ellis, and James Salter – something we mention so that you, dear reader, may grasp how incredible it is that Joy Williams is actually here. Equally overwhelmed is Gunnhild Øyehaug, who has translated Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories About God, the first book by Williams to appear in Norwegian.

Join them for a conversation led by Julia Aagenæs Wiedlocha about short stories and novels, people and gods, nature and writing, mercilessness and mercy, and animals.

The event will be held in English.