Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. These twelve stories further Joy Williamss utterly singular achievement, described by the Washington Post as poetic, disturbing, yet very funny. Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways-comic, tragic, unnerving-we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss.