The Collected Stories of Diane Williams
by Soho Press
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Description
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.”An A.V. Club 10 Favorite Reads of 2018
A PopMatters Best Short Story Collection of 2018
A Bright Young Things Best Book of 2018
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’ confounding fictions collected in so hefty a volume is like seeing snowflakes accrue into an avalanche.”
—Rumaan Alam, The New York Times
“This book will rewire your brain.”
—NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour
“The godmother of flash fiction.”
—The Paris Review
“As one of the masters of the short story, Williams has built a career out of defying logic and challenging traditional genre guidelines, all while bending the rules to offer readers a unique and thought-provoking literary experience.”
—Forbes, “The 25 Greatest Short Stories Of All Time”
“Diane Williams is among the most innovative writers alive today.”
—Reader's Digest, “The 38 Best Short Stories of All Time”
“Diane Williams seeks to stun, in something near the literal sense of the word . . . There are no first sentences full of orienting details, no dramatic dialogue, no neat epiphanies in a story's final lines. A concluding sentence is more likely to open up a story than to resolve it.”
—The New Republic
“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
“[Williams'] stories court laughter first, then, and only in retrospect, long-accumulated tears: tears of regret for opportunities lost, for people mislaid; tears of despair for the strangeness, the separateness that intimacy reveals and fails to overcome. You don't have to read all three hundred and five stories to get the point (Though you should. Williams can do more with two sentences than most writers can do with two hundred pages).”
—Merve Emre, The New York Review of Books
“Savage, wild, sideways stories flirt with reality and sever you from your roots, only to bring you back changed.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The world—so-called civilized—is Williams’ oyster, and her prose shucks like a knife to open a manifold view of the quivering human meat within.”
—Austin Chronicle
“Describing one of Diane Williams’ stories inevitably takes more words than those in the story itself. And there is something equally wonderful about the dissonance between the sheer size of the megalithic [The] Collected Stories of Diane Williams and the conciseness of the perplexing, beautiful texts within. I have always been drawn to books that can be opened at random and still provide a full reading experience. This volume is that and more. It reminds me of Borges’ book of sand, which has neither a beginning nor an end because its pages multiply infinitely as one turns them.”
—Hernán Diaz, In the Distance
“One of few true originals writing today, the author revels in confusions left unexplained, tensions unresolved . . . The result is a heady immersion into Williams’ wit and the often unsettling situations she throws her characters into, tracing the preoccupations, from sex to selfhood to death, of one of American literature’s most unique voices.”
—The A.V. Club
“A literary event of great import.”
—KBOO's Between the Covers
“The classic short story of posterity is a sprawling black hole, pussyfooting around a nub of recognizable truth for pages and pages, while Williams nails it in one.”
—The Baffler
“A once-in-a-generation event, a cause and effect of authorial significance.”
—Literary Hub
“This is an omnibus collection that belongs on the shelves of every reader who admires the short story form.”
—PopMatters
“Imagine little sparks of Old Testament prophets and Edward Gorey and Robert Coover and something else I can’t quite pin down (Dorothy Parker, maybe?) fizzing away and doing cool things to your brain.”
—Bright Young Things
“A pleasure for readers attentive to both language and story. Fans of flash fiction will want to study at the feet of this master of the form.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Williams creates clipped fictions that are designed to seduce . . . The experience is often unsettling, but her mini-roller-coasters offer a hell of a ride.”
—The Arts Fuse
“Williams is a past master of the form . . . [She] is witty, incisive, and broad-ranging in her interests . . . Important for serious literature collections.”
—Library Journal
Praise for Diane Williams
“Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird.”
—Jonathan Franzen
“Williams’ short precise, and emphatic sentences build a strange society whose denizens are not quite familiar to us and not quite comfortable with their own quietly disturbing evolutions. 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 preculiar than before after reading her?”
—Lydia Davis
“One of America's most exciting violators of habit.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Flash fictions that are often beautiful but impenetrable, structured like little riddles to unspool. While it is easy to compare Williams' work to that of Lydia Davis, another expert writer of absurdist shorts, this collection stands in its own category as defiantly whimsical and weird . . . Williams creates stories that can be consumed in small bites. But she provides enough material in each to chew over for an entire meal.”
—The New York Times
“Let's hear it for the magnificent Diane Williams, one of the wittiest and most exacting writers of our time. Her fictions are fervid endorsements of terrible, joyous life. But that's not quite right, because like all great literature, they are life.”
—Sam Lipsyte
“Diane Williams is hilarious, brilliant, eccentric, powerful, and, luckily, ours.”
—Deb Olin Unferth
“Discomfitingly and devastatingly funny, Williams upends the mundane, the painful, and the unusual, resulting—much in the way an art teacher might ask her class to copy a photograph upside-down—in precision and clarity.”
—Elle
“[Williams'] details are always precise, and her masterful prose distills her fictional worlds down to bright, brief moments . . . We can feel 'the mysteries of daily life' pulsing through Williams’ keenly observed, contemplative tales.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Her work is certainly odd, but it's also poetic, passionate, and precisely crafted. Her strange voices linger in the mind. Part of the pleasure of reading Williams is you have no idea what's coming next. Don't fret. These marvelous stories do have a beginning, middle and an end—just not necessarily in that order.”
—Los Angeles TimesDiane Williams is the author of eleven volumes of short fiction. The Collected Stories of Diane Williams—an omnibus of over three-hundred stories—appeared in 2018. Her most recent book of fiction, I Hear You’re Rich, was published in 2023. She is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. She 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 lives in New York City.Lady
She said please. Her face looked something more than bitter, with hair which it turned out was a hat, which came down over her ears, which was made of fake fur, which she never removed from her head. She had glasses on. Everything she wore helped me decide to let her in.
She wore flat black patent-leather shoes with pointed toes, with black stockings, wrinkled at the ankles, with silver triangles set in on top of the toes of the shoes to decorate them, and she had on a long black coat, and she was shorter than I am.
Her skin was a bleak sort of skin, and there was no beauty left in her—maybe in her body.
I felt that this lady is fast, because she was at the place where I keep my red rotary-dial phone before I was, after I said, “The phone is in here.”
She said, “I know the number.”
Sitting on the arm of my sofa, she dialed while her knees were knocking into and tipping back onto two legs my too-small table, which my phone sits on, and my oversized brass lamp, which sits on the table too, with the huge shade, might have crashed. The lamp was clanging, ready to go. She got it back.
She said, “Merla!” into the phone receiver.
I knew it—she must have known it—Merla knew it too, that Merla was only a matter of one hundred to two hundred yards from my house, because this woman I had let in, she had told me right off the house number she was looking for. She was telling Merla that it was impossible to get to her, that there was no way on earth, that she had kept on running into this east-west street.
“A nice picture,” she said to me. She had gotten herself up. She was looking at all of those men dressed for one of the dark-age centuries, marching through foliage, trekking around a hunched-up woman at a well, with their weird insignias on their chests, that nobody I know can figure out, with their faces—version after version of the same face.
She said, “I have a”—something something—“reproduction—” I cannot remember the dates or the royal reign to which she referred, when she was toying with this miniature chair that I have, grabbing it by its arm, and swiveling it on the clubbed foot of one leg, as she was leaving, after everything had been agreed upon with Merla. She would not be getting out of her car for Merla. Merla would meet her at the corner. Merla would.
She, the lady, must have been curious or put off by the jumble of dirty things at my front door that I suppose she first noticed when she was leaving, or by the splendor of my living room just off from the jumble. She missed going inside of it to see what was going on in each of the pictures in there.
What this woman had done to me was incalculable, and she had done it all in a period of time which had lasted no more than five minutes, which so many others have done, coming in here only for the telephone, because I had waved at her while she was shouting at Merla, I had said, “Would it help you to know the number of this house?”
Then I had told this little person my wrong address, not because I wanted to, nor because of any need on my part to make up a lie.
I said 2-7-0 which is way off the track, except for two digits, but I had rearranged them, the 7 and the 0, but I did not know I had done that. All that I knew was that I had done something unforgivably uncivil.
It was a lapse to reckon with. I took her into my arms, so that she could never leave me, and then jammed her up into the corner with the jumble by the front door and held her in there, exhausting myself to keep her in there. I didn’t care. It hurt her more than it hurt me, to be a lady.
Violence is never the problem. Love at first sight is.
The Nature of the Miracle
The green glass bottle rolled into, rolled out of my arms, out of my hands, and then exploded, just as it should, when it hits our bluestone floor, and spreads itself, and sparkling water, on the territory it was able to cover from our refrigerator to the back door.
The bottle used to fit tightly in my hand, easily, by the neck, and the way one thing leads to another in my mind, this means I should run away from my marriage.
I should run to the man who has told me he does not want me. He does not even like me. Except for once he took me, and my head was up almost under his arm, my neck was, and my hand went up his back and down his back, and he copied what I did to him on my back with his hand, so that I would know what it would be like, I would have an idea, and then I could run home to my marriage afterward, which is what I did before, after we were done with each other; and the way one thing leads to another in my mind, this means I should run to the man for more of it, but the way one thing leads to another, first I will tell my husband, “I would not choose you for a friend,” then I will run to the other man, so that I can hear him say the same thing to me.
This is unrequited love, which is always going around so you can catch it, and get sick with it, and stay home with it, or go out and go about your business getting anyone you have anything to do with sick, even if all that person has done is push the same shopping cart you pushed, so that she can go home, too, and have an accident, such as leaning over to put dishwasher powder into the dishwasher, so that she gets her eye stabbed by the tip of the bread knife, which is drip-drying in the dish rack. It is a tragedy to lose my eye, but this heroism of mine lasted only a matter of moments.
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.”An A.V. Club 10 Favorite Reads of 2018
A PopMatters Best Short Story Collection of 2018
A Bright Young Things Best Book of 2018
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’ confounding fictions collected in so hefty a volume is like seeing snowflakes accrue into an avalanche.”
—Rumaan Alam, The New York Times
“This book will rewire your brain.”
—NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour
“The godmother of flash fiction.”
—The Paris Review
“As one of the masters of the short story, Williams has built a career out of defying logic and challenging traditional genre guidelines, all while bending the rules to offer readers a unique and thought-provoking literary experience.”
—Forbes, “The 25 Greatest Short Stories Of All Time”
“Diane Williams is among the most innovative writers alive today.”
—Reader's Digest, “The 38 Best Short Stories of All Time”
“Diane Williams seeks to stun, in something near the literal sense of the word . . . There are no first sentences full of orienting details, no dramatic dialogue, no neat epiphanies in a story's final lines. A concluding sentence is more likely to open up a story than to resolve it.”
—The New Republic
“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
“[Williams'] stories court laughter first, then, and only in retrospect, long-accumulated tears: tears of regret for opportunities lost, for people mislaid; tears of despair for the strangeness, the separateness that intimacy reveals and fails to overcome. You don't have to read all three hundred and five stories to get the point (Though you should. Williams can do more with two sentences than most writers can do with two hundred pages).”
—Merve Emre, The New York Review of Books
“Savage, wild, sideways stories flirt with reality and sever you from your roots, only to bring you back changed.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The world—so-called civilized—is Williams’ oyster, and her prose shucks like a knife to open a manifold view of the quivering human meat within.”
—Austin Chronicle
“Describing one of Diane Williams’ stories inevitably takes more words than those in the story itself. And there is something equally wonderful about the dissonance between the sheer size of the megalithic [The] Collected Stories of Diane Williams and the conciseness of the perplexing, beautiful texts within. I have always been drawn to books that can be opened at random and still provide a full reading experience. This volume is that and more. It reminds me of Borges’ book of sand, which has neither a beginning nor an end because its pages multiply infinitely as one turns them.”
—Hernán Diaz, In the Distance
“One of few true originals writing today, the author revels in confusions left unexplained, tensions unresolved . . . The result is a heady immersion into Williams’ wit and the often unsettling situations she throws her characters into, tracing the preoccupations, from sex to selfhood to death, of one of American literature’s most unique voices.”
—The A.V. Club
“A literary event of great import.”
—KBOO's Between the Covers
“The classic short story of posterity is a sprawling black hole, pussyfooting around a nub of recognizable truth for pages and pages, while Williams nails it in one.”
—The Baffler
“A once-in-a-generation event, a cause and effect of authorial significance.”
—Literary Hub
“This is an omnibus collection that belongs on the shelves of every reader who admires the short story form.”
—PopMatters
“Imagine little sparks of Old Testament prophets and Edward Gorey and Robert Coover and something else I can’t quite pin down (Dorothy Parker, maybe?) fizzing away and doing cool things to your brain.”
—Bright Young Things
“A pleasure for readers attentive to both language and story. Fans of flash fiction will want to study at the feet of this master of the form.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Williams creates clipped fictions that are designed to seduce . . . The experience is often unsettling, but her mini-roller-coasters offer a hell of a ride.”
—The Arts Fuse
“Williams is a past master of the form . . . [She] is witty, incisive, and broad-ranging in her interests . . . Important for serious literature collections.”
—Library Journal
Praise for Diane Williams
“Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird.”
—Jonathan Franzen
“Williams’ short precise, and emphatic sentences build a strange society whose denizens are not quite familiar to us and not quite comfortable with their own quietly disturbing evolutions. 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 preculiar than before after reading her?”
—Lydia Davis
“One of America's most exciting violators of habit.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Flash fictions that are often beautiful but impenetrable, structured like little riddles to unspool. While it is easy to compare Williams' work to that of Lydia Davis, another expert writer of absurdist shorts, this collection stands in its own category as defiantly whimsical and weird . . . Williams creates stories that can be consumed in small bites. But she provides enough material in each to chew over for an entire meal.”
—The New York Times
“Let's hear it for the magnificent Diane Williams, one of the wittiest and most exacting writers of our time. Her fictions are fervid endorsements of terrible, joyous life. But that's not quite right, because like all great literature, they are life.”
—Sam Lipsyte
“Diane Williams is hilarious, brilliant, eccentric, powerful, and, luckily, ours.”
—Deb Olin Unferth
“Discomfitingly and devastatingly funny, Williams upends the mundane, the painful, and the unusual, resulting—much in the way an art teacher might ask her class to copy a photograph upside-down—in precision and clarity.”
—Elle
“[Williams'] details are always precise, and her masterful prose distills her fictional worlds down to bright, brief moments . . . We can feel 'the mysteries of daily life' pulsing through Williams’ keenly observed, contemplative tales.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Her work is certainly odd, but it's also poetic, passionate, and precisely crafted. Her strange voices linger in the mind. Part of the pleasure of reading Williams is you have no idea what's coming next. Don't fret. These marvelous stories do have a beginning, middle and an end—just not necessarily in that order.”
—Los Angeles TimesDiane Williams is the author of eleven volumes of short fiction. The Collected Stories of Diane Williams—an omnibus of over three-hundred stories—appeared in 2018. Her most recent book of fiction, I Hear You’re Rich, was published in 2023. She is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. She 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 lives in New York City.Lady
She said please. Her face looked something more than bitter, with hair which it turned out was a hat, which came down over her ears, which was made of fake fur, which she never removed from her head. She had glasses on. Everything she wore helped me decide to let her in.
She wore flat black patent-leather shoes with pointed toes, with black stockings, wrinkled at the ankles, with silver triangles set in on top of the toes of the shoes to decorate them, and she had on a long black coat, and she was shorter than I am.
Her skin was a bleak sort of skin, and there was no beauty left in her—maybe in her body.
I felt that this lady is fast, because she was at the place where I keep my red rotary-dial phone before I was, after I said, “The phone is in here.”
She said, “I know the number.”
Sitting on the arm of my sofa, she dialed while her knees were knocking into and tipping back onto two legs my too-small table, which my phone sits on, and my oversized brass lamp, which sits on the table too, with the huge shade, might have crashed. The lamp was clanging, ready to go. She got it back.
She said, “Merla!” into the phone receiver.
I knew it—she must have known it—Merla knew it too, that Merla was only a matter of one hundred to two hundred yards from my house, because this woman I had let in, she had told me right off the house number she was looking for. She was telling Merla that it was impossible to get to her, that there was no way on earth, that she had kept on running into this east-west street.
“A nice picture,” she said to me. She had gotten herself up. She was looking at all of those men dressed for one of the dark-age centuries, marching through foliage, trekking around a hunched-up woman at a well, with their weird insignias on their chests, that nobody I know can figure out, with their faces—version after version of the same face.
She said, “I have a”—something something—“reproduction—” I cannot remember the dates or the royal reign to which she referred, when she was toying with this miniature chair that I have, grabbing it by its arm, and swiveling it on the clubbed foot of one leg, as she was leaving, after everything had been agreed upon with Merla. She would not be getting out of her car for Merla. Merla would meet her at the corner. Merla would.
She, the lady, must have been curious or put off by the jumble of dirty things at my front door that I suppose she first noticed when she was leaving, or by the splendor of my living room just off from the jumble. She missed going inside of it to see what was going on in each of the pictures in there.
What this woman had done to me was incalculable, and she had done it all in a period of time which had lasted no more than five minutes, which so many others have done, coming in here only for the telephone, because I had waved at her while she was shouting at Merla, I had said, “Would it help you to know the number of this house?”
Then I had told this little person my wrong address, not because I wanted to, nor because of any need on my part to make up a lie.
I said 2-7-0 which is way off the track, except for two digits, but I had rearranged them, the 7 and the 0, but I did not know I had done that. All that I knew was that I had done something unforgivably uncivil.
It was a lapse to reckon with. I took her into my arms, so that she could never leave me, and then jammed her up into the corner with the jumble by the front door and held her in there, exhausting myself to keep her in there. I didn’t care. It hurt her more than it hurt me, to be a lady.
Violence is never the problem. Love at first sight is.
The Nature of the Miracle
The green glass bottle rolled into, rolled out of my arms, out of my hands, and then exploded, just as it should, when it hits our bluestone floor, and spreads itself, and sparkling water, on the territory it was able to cover from our refrigerator to the back door.
The bottle used to fit tightly in my hand, easily, by the neck, and the way one thing leads to another in my mind, this means I should run away from my marriage.
I should run to the man who has told me he does not want me. He does not even like me. Except for once he took me, and my head was up almost under his arm, my neck was, and my hand went up his back and down his back, and he copied what I did to him on my back with his hand, so that I would know what it would be like, I would have an idea, and then I could run home to my marriage afterward, which is what I did before, after we were done with each other; and the way one thing leads to another in my mind, this means I should run to the man for more of it, but the way one thing leads to another, first I will tell my husband, “I would not choose you for a friend,” then I will run to the other man, so that I can hear him say the same thing to me.
This is unrequited love, which is always going around so you can catch it, and get sick with it, and stay home with it, or go out and go about your business getting anyone you have anything to do with sick, even if all that person has done is push the same shopping cart you pushed, so that she can go home, too, and have an accident, such as leaning over to put dishwasher powder into the dishwasher, so that she gets her eye stabbed by the tip of the bread knife, which is drip-drying in the dish rack. It is a tragedy to lose my eye, but this heroism of mine lasted only a matter of moments.
PUBLISHER:
Soho Press
ISBN-10:
1616959851
ISBN-13:
9781616959852
BINDING:
Paperback / softback
PUBLICATION YEAR:
2019
NUMBER OF PAGES:
784
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
5.5300(W) x 8.2900(H) x 1.9100(D)
AUDIENCE TYPE:
General/Adult
LANGUAGE:
English