The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’ fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection, “The Pelican Child.”

The critically beloved author’s first book of full-length stories since 2015’s “ The Visiting Privilege” contains a dozen works, all of which were published in journals, magazines and anthologies over the past 15 years. Trying to distill their subject matter yields plot descriptions that read a bit like Mad Libs.

In “The Fellow,” a caretaker at an artist’s retreat converses with a guest’s poetry-reading dog after a flood. Dismayed by the future of the Great Barrier Reef, a daycare owner in “My First Car” hires a stranger off the street to watch the center’s babies for a week while she prays for humanity. And in “After the Haiku Period,” twin 60-something heiresses storm a slaughterhouse to make a statement about their late father’s capitalist greed.

But Williams doesn’t rely solely on intriguing set pieces to envelop her readers. A detail from her prose can stop you in your tracks, as when a testy discussion about inheritance in “The Beach House” suddenly gives way to two friends talking about whether Ted Kaczynski had a deck of tarot cards in prison.

Or when the protagonist of “Stuff” reacts to his terminal cancer diagnosis by lamenting that “only last year, he had been on the cover of the telephone directory.” And sometimes you have to pause simply to ponder the insightful beauty of what is being observed, as when the narrator of “Flour” remarks that “Dusk is not nearly as considerate as is generally assumed.”

Williams isn’t chasing shock value, however, but offering subtle yet pointed assessments of our society. This commentary can be as casual as the fact that the daycare center is located “on a frontage road between a mattress wholesaler and a knife outlet.” Or it can be explicit, as in “Baba Iaga & the Pelican Child,” which provides a moral to its fairy tale encounter between John James Audubon and Slavic folklore, stating that “the birds and beasts of the world…should be valued for their bright and beautiful and mysterious selves and not willfully harmed.”

Death and loss feature prominently in these stories, which include several characters seemingly trapped in a metaphorical or metaphysical purgatory. Willie conjures up visits with his late father in “Nettle,” perhaps hoping to atone for the role he played in his father’s death.

Jane Click, who is consumed by grief over the death of her two children in “Chaunt,” retreats to the Dove, a building housing “decent enough individuals caught by the mishaps of time in a circumstance of continual, bearable punishment.” And in “Chicken Hill,” a woman named Ruth tries to suss out a mystery from her childhood by conversing with a girl who might actually be her younger self.

One of the last things that child tells Ruth is that “Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.” Three of the stories in “The Pelican Child” date from after the start of the pandemic, a period when Williams also published the novel “ Harrow."

Though now in her 80s, Williams’ imagination clearly hasn’t failed, so hopefully her remarkable stories will keep coming.

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The Pelican Child

By: Joy Williams.

Publisher: Knopf, 157 pages.

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