Diane Gill Livres

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.”

Diane Williams, an American master of the short story who will “rewire your brain” (NPR), is back with a collection in which she once again expands the possibilities of fiction. These stories depict ordinary moments—a visit to the doctor’s office or a married couple’s hundredth dance together—but within the quotidian, Williams delivers a lifetime of insecurities, lusts, rejections, and revelations, making her work equally discomfiting and amusing. With unmatched wit in every sentence, Williams captures whole universes in a story, delivering visionary insights into what it means to be human. Williams’ devotees will be newly enthralled by her elegantly strange, bewitching stories in How High? — That High. Those who have yet to meet “the godmother of flash fiction” (The Paris Review) will find an extraordinary introduction in these pages.

The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called 'folktales that hammer like a nail gun' and these forty new ones are sharper than ever. Their originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief

'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.