Author(s): Diane Williams

Short Stories | Read our reviews!

'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's 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.

Praise for How High? - That High-'Williams is a magician of the miniature ... Don't let their diminutive stature fool you- These pieces pack a punch. Brief, elliptical, steeped in longing - or is that lust? - they offer slices of life that rely on interior more than exterior details, which is to say they are small road maps of the soul ... All the pieces here ... are rigorous in both language and emotion, using nuance and inference to explore the implications, the contradictions, that people rarely share aloud ... Williams'a small gems are as dense and beautiful as diamonds, compressed from the carbon of daily life.'-Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Collected Stories of Diane Williams- 'Erudite, elegant and stubbornly experimental. For any writer, an omnibus collection is a triumph. To see years of Ms Williams's confounding fictions collected in so hefty a volume is like seeing snowflakes accrue into an avalanche.'-Rumaan Alam, The New York Times

Praise for The Collected Stories of Diane Williams- 'Full of funny, libidinal and invigorating enigmas ... Readers who love the arresting phrase, the surprising word, will gravitate to her ... It's perfect to leave on the bedside table, to be consulted before one's dreamlife begins.'-Ange Mlinko, The London Review of Books

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
If it is necessary to move out to the very edge of ourselves, to the part of ourselves that is least ourselves, to be near another person, another person who has also moved out to the very edge of themselves, to the part of themselves that is least themselves, in order to be near us, what value can there be in any communication that takes place, if any communication can take place, between parties who are therefore almost strangers even to themselves? Diane Williams’s short, energetic, hugely disorienting short stories pass as sal volatile through the fug of relationships, defamiliarising the ordinary elements of everyday lives to expose the sad, ludicrous, hopeless topographies of what passes for existence. This is not a nihilistic enterprise, however, for Williams has immense sympathies and her stories themselves demonstrate the possibility of connection through the very act of delineating its impossibility. With the finest of needles, the most ordinary of details, Williams picks out the unacknowledged, unacknowledgeable but familiar hopeless longing that underlies our unreasoned and unreasonable striving for human relations, a longing that makes us more isolated the harder we strive for connection. So much is left unsaid in these stories that they act as foci for the immense unseen weight of their contexts, precisely activating pressure-points on the reader’s sensibilities.