As the writer Joy Williams strolls the beef barn at the county fair, she notes mournfully the lovely eyelashes of the future filets mignons. “There’s such a disconnect here,” she says. While charmed by the farm animals of southern Michigan, she knows where this story ends: the dinner table. The knife. She’s a vegetarian and defender of nonhuman life from cattle down to the mosquitoes in the Florida mangroves, and as she watches fairgoers stroke velvety bovine snouts bound for the butcher, what she sees is death done wrong. Tons of it.

That was 2017, during a stint as a visiting writer at Hillsdale College. Then, Williams was promoting Ninety-Nine Stories of God, a book of often bizarre, borderline absurdist vignettes about God entering earthly situations awkwardly: applying to adopt a turtle, wrong-footing human hosts for asking why they’ve polluted his “living water,” trying to run with wolves. They’re short enough—often no more than a paragraph, with the title listed at the end as a punchline—that the more successful ones would come off like a standup comedy routine if the themes they address weren’t as profoundly unsettling as they are amusing. The unexpected form and subject matter seem intended to make the familiar unfamiliar: the person and personality of God, the divine interacting with His creation, the surprisingly tricky question of what storytelling even is, and is for. Next came Harrow, a novel about an aspiring ecoterrorist in a dystopian future in which most of the natural world has perished in a climate crisis.