We are delighted to announce that you can now read Fairy Tale Review Press’s 30th Anniversary Edition of The Changeling by Joy Williams as an ebook, thanks to our dear friends at Weightless Books. This book never should have have gone out of print in the first place; it’s a 20th century classic. Bewildering, mythic, and new. Such an honor to bring it into the darkly glittering world once again in new form. From Rick Moody’s foreword to the anniversary edition:
The Changeling, which is rich with the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival (Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published about the same time), and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano, would have seemed perfectly legible in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow was published, or Gaddis’s J.R. But the late seventies, with their punk rock nihilism and their Studio 54 fatuousness, were perhaps not properly situated to understand this variety of Joy Williams challenge. To their shame.
Thirty years later, the situation looks quite different. Felicitously so. The Joy Williams who went on to write the astonishing short stories of Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest, and such marvels of realistic other-worldliness as her recent novel The Quick and the Dead (2002), has instructed us, as the most original writers must, as to the consumption of her graceful arabesques. The tectonic movement of her paragraphs and her narratives no longer looks impulsive, if indeed it ever did. Now it looks exactly like originality.
