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

IN PRAISE OF
DIANE WILLIAMS

"An operation worthy of a master spy, a double agent in the house of fiction."
-The New York Times

"(In) Williams's latest, she builds on her reputation as the foremost advocate of "flash fiction."
-Kirkus Reviews

"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

IT WAS LIKE MY TRYING TO
HAVE A TENDER-HEARTED NATURE

The hero of the novella On Sexual Strength explores his perplexing lust for his neighbor's wife. As he crosses the boundaries of good behavior and good sense at every opportunity, he ingeniously narrates his adventure as both a tragedy and escapade. Celebrated for her linguistic inventiveness, Diane Williams's new stories and novella continue to advance her inimitable voice.

"Williams's 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 peculiar than before after reading her?"
-Lydia Davis

"With the uproarious rudeness of a great mind, Diane Williams writes surprise after surprise, radically reinvented, indecorous and daring and downright funny stories."
-Christine Schutt

"Diane Williams's singular, unsettling genius has never been as memorably and heartrendingly evident as in this virtuosic new collection of richly gnomic fictions that are, as always, sublimely vital in every line."
-Gary Lutz

"These outrageous and ferociously strange stories test the limits of behavior, of manners, of language, and mark Diane Williams as a startlingly original writer worthy of our closest attention."
-Ben Marcus