I Hear You're Rich

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.Praise for I Hear You're Rich

A Vulture Best Book of 2023 (So Far)
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2023
Southwest Review's 10 Must-Read Books of 2023

“Like looking into the deep, expressive eyes of a person . . . struggling against forces that are not always clear to them.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“You might call Diane Williams’s plots dreamlike — they proceed according to their own mysterious logic, interrupting themselves — but they’re not hazy . . . [Williams] turn[s] the everyday stuff of realist fiction into props for existential fun houses . . . I Hear You’re Rich will please fans of Lydia Davis and David Lynch.”
—Vulture

“Stories that offer glimpses into the mundane and exhilarating beauty of everyday life.”
—The Millions

“Guaranteed to shift the world around you, if only for a moment.”
—Lit Hub

“Every event, thought, image, phrase, and word are given equal opportunity to claim or elude your attention. Turn the pages and see what stands out to you. You might be surprised.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“Williams’s sentences are syntactically flexible, spasmodic, surprising . . . Flip to a random page and you’ll likely find at least one question. The world for Williams’s characters is an endlessly baffling place—which might be another way of saying it’s endlessly interesting.”
—Southwest Review

“I Hear You’re Rich is a brilliant achievement by one of our foremost contemporary writers . . . Williams is always elegant, even when bawdy, and is gracefully lyrical without being precious; the prose she creates is a kind of poetry, mysterious yet resonant. Brevity has seldom been put to such fine use.”
—Rain Taxi Review of Books


“It takes a master of the short story form to craft truly incisive slice-of-life fiction, and Diane Williams proves that she’s among the best with her latest collection, I Hear You’re Rich . . . In each brief story, we see the entirety of the human experience bubbling underneath.”
—West Trade Review

“Mesmerizing.”
—Tertulia

“How much can one writer do with how little? Her stories have been asking this for decades and, because Williams is so intelligent, fearless and tough, she does extraordinary things within the constraints of her own stringent rules.”
—Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Is this America’s smartest—strangest—short-story writer?  As proved by I Hear You're Rich, Diane Williams’s fiction, long beloved by those in the know, is joyful, unnerving, and linguistically spry.”
—The Telegraph (UK)

“Spry, sly and spirited, Williams’ very short stories — most are a couple of pages long — are brilliantly unsettling.”
—Daily Mail (UK)

“[Williams] writes an unmistakable type of story: short, tightly wrought, each sentence a small masterpiece – a three-act play in miniature.”
—The Spectator (UK)

“Williams delights . . . What a treat! Life is rendered immediate and fresh through her eyes as she takes on the simplest of subjects – affairs, a request for money, the act of carrying a cake – with precision and gusto.”
—RUSSH Magazine

“These 33 stories, a few as short as a paragraph, pack inordinate complexity into tiny spaces and take unpredictable turns toward unexpected conclusions . . . From the elusiveness of love to the desire for escape, the themes here are hard to mine in flash fiction. That Williams does so is a tribute to her talent.”
—Shelf Awareness, Starred Review

“It’s nearly impossible to categorize Williams’ work . . . In story after story, she upends what readers have grown to expect from traditional narratives—a beginning, middle, and end, to say the least—sometimes leaving us without any of those elements at all. A Williams story might be made up of a fragment of dialogue, a thought, a description, or some combination of these . . . Mysterious, gemlike, and strange.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Williams’s blend of precision and understatement make her insights on her characters’ fears and limitations cut deeply while leaving the stories open to interpretation. This will leave readers aching in all the best ways.”
—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Diane Williams

“I would describe Williams as the writer who saved my life—or my soul, if one believes such a thing exists . . . [Williams’] stories, many no longer than a page, suggest that what is left unsaid between people remains more powerful than what they have the capacity to articulate. Although Williams studied with Gordon Lish (and before that, with Philip Roth), her minimalism is distinctive for its sublimity and its spirituality, its ability to evoke the laws of a world apart.”
—Merve Emre, The New Yorker

“Williams can do more with two sentences than most writers can do with two hundred pages.”
—The New York Review of Books

“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.”
—The London Review of Books

“This book will rewire your brain.”
—NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour

"Not a single moment of the prose, here, is what you expect, and even the ordinary is, in the context created by Diane Williams, no longer ordinary: it is fresh, happy and peculiar—or is it we who are refreshed, happy and more peculiar than before after reading her?"
—Lydia DavisDiane Williams is the founder and editor of the distinguished literary annual NOON, the archive of which, as well as Williams' personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library. She is the author of eleven volumes of short fiction. She lives in New York City.Oriel?

We were in the room where there is often a deep stream of daylight.
     And my husband’s mother had made sunshine cake for us, but since she did not like to walk—it hurt her legs—I was the one who carried the platter with the sumptuous cake to the table.
     But where best to look as I went forward? At the cake? Or at their faces? This task takes common sense and balance as do all my others.
     What to name our baby?—a sobriquet that means rich? Why not helper of humankind?—ardent or dawn? Deirdre, I like, but the name means sorrow—or Oriel?
     So we ate cake and claimed happiness for the birth event that will come soon enough and the name I prefer for our daughter is Clara—which means shining and bright. And on our walk home I noted leaves much darker than others toward the center of a tree that I focused on.
     The shape of the shadows? A scrap of a shadow maintained its roundness and then that shadow started to move and next I felt a sharp tapping on my back, caused by a stiff prod—by a wand of some sort, but when I turned to look, I saw no pointed object, and no one.
     My husband, Stephen, said, “Jean, what’s wrong?” He said, “Which is it?”
     A girlish figure with her children and with their full voices in tow, casually passed us by, while spreading loving-kindness and grace, which I think may have become fashionable.
 

The Tune


Several birds had worms in their mouths, but one did not, and he whistled.
     I whistled.
     The whistling bird flew a bit beyond me and then settled again on the fence and I pursued him with the only tune I could manage until he answered back while he jumped to the ground at my feet.
     He was my creature briefly. We didn’t even vary the volume.
     What I like best is taking my pleasure alongside somebody I barely know in such spasms.
 
 
Start Here


I got to the building that was a church that had a high ceiling and a long stair going down and a woman was coming after me, an elderly woman, but I didn’t know her name. She was in a hurry. She said, “Tell the pastor that I saw you.” I said okay, but I didn’t remember who the pastor was or the woman’s name. Why didn’t I just tell the woman that? I just said okay to please her and it was dishonest.
     And even though I was indoors, I thought, Let’s see if I can fly, and I was floating around. People were looking at me and I said, “Don’t try to do this! This takes a lot of practice.”
     I was happy and I was chubby. I had on some kind of woolen clothing.
     I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t flown?
 

A Slew of Attractions

I was Diane Williams leaving town and I had left my family behind too, as well as a situation that had overwhelmed me.
     My seatmate slept and we had an undemanding climb into the air, as the Airbus carried us above a slew of attractions.
     And then we endured the severe stress of turbulence that lasted for too long, but the steward said he was not concerned and that the wings of the plane can bend quite easily to accommodate such trouble—and to show me how, he stretched his arms up high above his head.
     The cabin was dim and then light entered at a low angle and further illumined the pages of my book.
     My seatmate inquired about the book that tells a story much like my own. It is necessarily controlled and the personalities are abstracted. The novel is Murder in Estoril by Edith Templeton.
     My seatmate said, “Life! This is the way to look at it!”
     It was a cloud she pointed to that had flanking branches, fancy curly touches, and a generous nature that had to be the creation of a god who had forgotten how angry she is.
     We heard for the trip’s remainder the shifting of some invisible plane parts that made a low-grade cracking sound that I had to worry over.
     On land, as in the air, I check the timepiece I wear often. Its second hand seems to tremble when it advances and its dial presents such a modern face.
     My own face is old style. I have seen my face in a seventeenth-century painting, A Girl and Her Duenna.
     The duenna is extremely amused and her eyes are my eyes, as is the tint of her skin and her forehead’s contour.
     She presses a kerchief against her mouth and chin and she will guffaw for ages—has done.
     And do you know where I am this minute?—do you?
     Where I am has an urban flavor and I ask myself to please make plain what my laughing matters are.