Diane Williams

"The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called 'folk tales that hammer like a nail gun, ' and these forty new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny."--Publisher website.

Stories

Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine

With over three hundred new and previously published short stories as well as three novellas, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together distilled works of “unsettling brilliance” (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of American short fiction. From Ben Marcus’ introduction to The Collected Stories of Diane Williams: “Diane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, most of them no more than a page long. She’s a hero of the form: the sudden fiction, the flash fiction, whatever it’s being called these days. The stories are short. They defy logic. They thumb their nose at conventional sense, or even unconventional sense. But if sense is in short supply in these texts, that leaves more room for splendor and sorrow. These stories upend expectations and prize enigma and the uncanny above all else. The Williams epiphany should be patented, or bottled—on the other hand, it should also be regulated and maybe rationed, because it’s severe. It’s a rare feeling her stories trigger, but it’s a keen and deep and welcome one, the sort of feeling that wakes us up to complication and beauty and dissonance and fragility.”

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

Diane Williams, “godmother of flash fiction” (The Paris Review), returns with 33 short, brilliant stories. In Williams’ stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life. In perfectly honed sentences, with a sly and occasionally wild wit, Williams shows us how any moment of any day can open onto disappointment, pleasure, and possibility.

I Hear You're Rich

"Williams delivers visionary insights into what it means to be human in stories as short as one or two pages. Her startling sentences often function like wake-up trumpet blasts, and her latest collection of ultra-short masterworks is a container for the elliptical, the magisterial, the voluptuous, and the profane. Set in cafés and houses, taxicabs and gardens, the stories of Diane Williams, "the godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), deliver moments of extraordinary beauty and wisdom"--

How High? -- That High

Vicky Swanky is a beauty

Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty

Famous for her works of "flash fiction" which capture life, love, and contradiction in a single page, Diane Williams continues to forge her own innovative tradition in this new collection. Including over three dozen short stories along with three novellas, Romancer Erector is her boldest collection to date. Here she once again astonishes us with her distinctive voice, detached yet fiercely intimate. As one critic writes: "the effect is original, as if a strange little memory has insinuated itself into the reader's own memory, to remain there...incapable of assimilation." Like intricately wrapped gifts, these tales deliver the hidden, the haunted, the charms, the bell, the mansions inside of the human heart.

Novella and Stories

Romancer Erector

One of Elle's "Must-Read Titles for Your Book Club." Chosen by The Millions and Flavorwire as one of the most-anticipated books of 2016. The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called “folk tales that hammer like a nail gun,” and these 40 new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny. Not a single moment here is what you might expect. While there is immense pleasure to be found in Williams’s spot-on observations about how we behave in our highest and lowest moments, the heart of the drama beats in the language of American short fiction’s grand master, whose originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief.

Stupefaction

Some Sexual Success Stories: Plus Other Stories in which God Might Choose to Appear

Stories 

This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate

"The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together over three hundred new and previously published short fictions--distilled works of "unsettling brilliance" (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of the American short story"--

The collected stories of Diane Williams

A Novella and Stories

It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature

In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams's unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire—are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence. These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling—the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams' position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.

‘The writer who saved my life — or my soul.’ Merve Emre, The New Yorker ‘A true living hero of the American avant-garde.’ Jonathan Franzen ‘One of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt.’ Lydia Davis A new collection of stories from the ‘godmother of flash fiction’ (The Paris Review). In Williams' stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life. In perfectly honed sentences, with a sly and occasionally wild wit, Williams shows us how any moment of any day can open onto disappointment, pleasure, and possibility.

Diane Williams

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