- Eley Williams

Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good

By Eley Williams
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A Granta Best of Young British Novelists

The stunning new collection of stories from the award-winning author of The Liar’s Dictionary and Attrib. and Other Stories.

Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good is a virtuoso new short story collection from James Tait Black Memorial Prize-winner, Eley Williams. Rich in masterful characterisation, the stories explore uncertainty and how we grapple with it, as well as misunderstandings and confusions in a world that appears bound by rules and codes, both spoken and unspoken. The collection features the story ‘Scrimshaw’ which was shortlisted for 2020 BBC National Short Story Award.

Praise for Eley Williams:

‘She is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own’ Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

‘Funny, playful and utterly bravura’ Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

‘It’s exhilarating to dive into the associative rush of Williams’s writing’ Vanity Fair

Format: Hardback
Release Date: 18 Jul 2024
Pages: 176
ISBN: 978-0-00-861892-6
Eley Williams\' collection of fiction Attrib. and Other Stories (2017) was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her novel The Liar\'s Dictionary won a 2021 Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and listed as a Guardian Book of the Year. In 2023, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her writing is published in journals and anthologies including Modern Queer Poets, The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story edited by Philip Hensher, and Liberating the Canon edited by Isabel Waidner, with stories and serialised fiction also commissioned by Radio 4. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Praise for Eley Williams: -

”'It's exhilarating to dive into the associative rush of Williams's writing” - Vanity Fair

”'She is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own” - Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

”'No fiction writer is more exciting on sentence level than Eley Williams” - The White Review

”'There's no one working in the UK quite like her” - Jay Walsh, author of Girl Online: A User Manual

”'Funny, playful and utterly bravura” - Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

”'Gorgeous, brilliant” - Max Porter, author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

”'It is impossible not to identify with Williams's candid observations of the quirks and quandaries of emotional life. Her experimentation is not a case of obfuscation: we come away feeling that we know precisely what she means” - Times Literary Supplement

”'Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson, and you won't be too wrong” - Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

'[The] most exciting of young British writers … Williams luxuriates in words and wordplay, in definition and precision and invention' Big Issue -