Reading Williams’s new collection of short-short stories, Concerning the Future of Souls—something of a follow-up to 2016’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God—one comes away from the experience with the belief that Williams has something like a preternatural insight into our predicaments: life, death, and the discomposing interim between the two.

I first read State of Grace when I was twenty-two years old. I was heartbroken and ill and unmedicated and without much in the way of a sense of who I was or what it was I was meant to be doing.