In 99 short chapters Joy Williams shows off her range of rhetorical gifts, delivering funny, sad, thoughtful and thought-provoking stories that build on each other, circling the concept of God slowly and from seemingly every angle. "One should not define God in human language nor anthropomorphize that which is ineffable and indescribable," she writes. "We can only know what God is not, not what God is." In some stories, God is dealt with directly. Like 'Jail,' which features a woman arrested for shoplifting considering the hypothetical "Book of Q" which the Bible is supposedly based on. In more whimsical tales, the Lord speaks with a den of wolves about their plight on Earth, promising to take away their taste for sheep, or the Lord traveling to the Southwest US to adopt a tortoise. In other stories, Williams considers the Native American's belief in cyclical time, Franz Kafka's sense that writing is a form of prayer, Philip K. Dick's anamnesis (or his "loss of forgetfulness") as he senses the Holy Spirit while speaking to a pharmacist. The stories are bizarre, and Williams weds her beautiful descriptions with a macabre sense of humor and playfulness that, all together, makes the book light and unpredictable. Read 99 Stories of God in one sitting and maybe it will stay with you much longer than the hour it takes to read.