Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine - Tapa dura

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 "She is one of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt." --Lydia Davis "The uncanny has met its ideal delivery system: the stories of Diane Williams." --Ben Marcus "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. Well, you figure it out." --Sam Lipsyte "Diane Williams is hilarious, brilliant, eccentric, powerful, and, luckily, ours." --Deb Olin Unferth "One of America's most exciting violators of habit." --Los Angeles Times "However comfortable you may be with the avant-garde, you're probably not too cool to admit you wouldn't know a modern-day "Ulysses" if it bit you. Diane Williams's new experimental work attempts something far more rude." --The New York Times PRAISE FOR VICKY SWANKY IS A BEAUTY "Williams's book is populated with heartbreak, affairs, and death, and however mystifying passages can be, the author has a sly humor that cuts through everything else. Equal parts satisfying, mysterious, thoughtful, and quick." --Publishers Weekly "'Vicky Swanky' is Williams at her best, shaking us awake again to the persistent strangeness of human life." --Jenny Hendrix, The Boston Globe "The shorts in Diane Williams's Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty emit an unsettling brilliance, becoming, on repeated readings, even stranger and more revelatory." --Vanity Fair "To read these delightful stories is simply to drop in on random encounters as they are occurring--tense, awkward, jokey, fraught." --The San Francisco Chronicle "Even without the cameo appearances by the character 'Diane Williams,' it's unlikely that anyone who's attempted to tease apart a handful of Williams' stories will forget her linguistic precision, the ways she whittles sentences into solid gems, or her wonderfully strange way of seeing." --The Millions "Dark, strange and revelatory" --Time Out New York "True to her reputation, these are refined stories possessing many hallmarks of [Diane Williams's] past work: sharp dialogue fraught with tension, highly agile shifts in perspective, acerbic humour, and the ability to surprise without reducing the form too often to a gimmick or a stunt." --The National "In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, we are reminded that Diane Williams is a brilliant writer and that there is absolutely nothing preordained in this world, which is sometimes a truly great thing." --Bomb

The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called "folk tales that hammer like a nail gun," and these 40 new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny--even though within these covers a mother dies, an illicit love affair is revealed, a ghost pays a visit, and police are called to the scene. Not a single moment here is what you might expect. While there is immense pleasure to be found in Williams's spot-on observations about how we behave in our highest and lowest moments, the heart of the drama beats in the language of American short fiction's grand master, whose originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief.