Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good

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A Granta Best Young British Novelist
The stunning new collection of stories from the award-winning author of The Liars Dictionary and Attrib. and Other Stories.

'Magical' JON McGREGOR
Granta Best Young British novelist and author of Attrib. and other stories, Eley Williams returns with a subversive and essential collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. Whether jostling for attention or ducking to evade it, here characters seek connections not only with each other but also with versions of themselves.

In Cuviers Feather, a courtroom sketch artist delights in committing portraits of their lover to paper but their need to capture likenesses forever is revealed to have darker, more complex intentions. At the centre of Wilgefortis, a childs schoolyard crush on a saint marks a confrontation with the reality of a teenage body in flux. An editor of canned laughter loses their confidence and seeks divine intervention; an essayist annotates their thoughts on Keats by way of internet-gleaned sex tips.

Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form and considers notions of playfulness, authenticity and care as it holds relationships to account: their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths.

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

Reviews

For every brush with darkness in these wonderful stories, there is a counterpoint of light, bright enough to come off the page and go with you about your day. I dont know anyone else who can write like this language does something special for Eley Williams. What a joy! Ben Pester, author of Am I in the Right Place

'Vital, vivid and oddly companionable stories that make wonders from the ordinary in a heady but precise wordplay' David Hayden, author of Darker With the Lights On

Eley Williams is a visionary writer. She does things with words most writers can only dream about. Reading Williams makes me want to up my game as a writer. Each story is a multi-layered, kaleidoscopic exploration of a moment. Williams writes with both buoyancy and tremendous weight Jan Carson, author of Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Swimming in Williams oceanic imagination is a joy for the head and the heart. Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good presents wave after wave of delightful, face-slapping linguistic shock Ruby Cowling, author of This Paradise

Theres a frightening type of joy in these stories; erudite and audacious, Williams work is satisfying in the same way I imagine throwing something delicate and valuable off a cliff must be satisfying Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightening

With her new short fiction collection, Eley Williams confirms her status as champion of the quixotic, the profound, the pulling-the-rug-from-under-your-feet unexpected. A writer to treasure, with not a clich in sight Catherine Taylor, author of The Stirrings

Author Bio

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. 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.