The Worldwide Church of the Handicapped

By Marie Sheppard Williams

Book Overview

'Marie Sheppard Williams is delightfully politically incorrect. She takes us inside sheltered workshops, hospitals, funeral parlors, assorted agencies staffed by social workers, and to a United Way picnic attended by dwarfs. Her characters are unique and unforgettable. This is a disarming, disturbing book."
-Maxine Kumin, author of Women, Animals, & Vegetables, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 'Worldwide Church is an absolute joy. I have been reading it all day.and made a fool of myself at Starbucks because I was laughing so hard that tears ran down my face, and then I started to cry.."
-Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, and Traveling Mercies 'It's a wonderful book .."
-Bill Holm, Minnesota Author of The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth; and Minnesota Book Award Winner

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595378730
• ISBN13: 9780595378739
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An important, brilliant, welcome voice. Please write more!

I'm on my third read through these stories since receiving it as a gift in the year of it's publication -- 1996. This is, however, the first time I've read the Kirkus review and I am VERY annoyed by it's condescending tone. I'm reading it again to find the me I locate when I read her stories. Williams' book is unique, as all great books are, and simultaneously reminds me in style, tone, manner of address, of certain other writers, eg. Grace Paley, Chekov, Borges, Flannery O'Connor, Saroyan. . . . The voice of the outsider living among outsiders whose outsiderness unites them (more or less) but excludes the writer as much as the "normal" (or "normative") world does. The social worker who "meant" to be a writer, the not-quite-well and healthy person who works with the "officially" handicapped, the atheist with all the impulses of one of the faithful, the "liberal" acutely attuned to the narrownesses that oppress, including her own narrowness. The griever who cannot stop laughing. . . . I long for another book from this writer.

An Amazing, mind-opening book!

This book is beautifully written, very funny at times, very poignant at others. It is mind-expanding and perspective-challenging. It's hard for me to imagine that it's fiction because it feels so real, so I decided to believe it as nonfiction. It's the best collection of short stories I've ever read -- it has a wonderful life-affirming quality behind the sometimes sad circumstances it covers. Highly recommended!!!