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

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

Author: Diane Williams

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2007-10-15

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1573661406

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This work by Diane Williams delves into the strange relationships of men and women. From marital betrayal to spousal abuse and unrelenting desire, Williams illuminates the lives of her characters in prose as sparse and stark as it is beautiful. These stories are as short as prose poems and as complex as novels. In them, meanings remain ambiguous and consequences seem uncertain. In the novella “On Sexual Strength” she describes the intense and sometimes strange relationship between two neighboring couples and the rage that comes with adultery, and a narrator whose social inadequacies and lack of inhibitions lead to destruction. The world Williams creates is a sensual place where quiet epiphanies—such as the one that occurs after an extramarital affair— are also possible: “It was like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted nature. This is how love can be featured.” Such flashes of insight and emotion glue together the fragments of life Williams lays before the reader, and the reader rejoices at the revelations.

Flash Fiction America: 73 Very Short Stories

Flash Fiction America: 73 Very Short Stories PDF

Author: James Thomas

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0393358038

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A spectacular new anthology of the best short-short fiction from across the United States. It has been more than thirty years since the term “flash fiction” was first coined, perfectly describing the power in the brevity of these stories, each under 1,000 words. Since then, the form has taken hold in the American imagination. For this latest installment in the popular Flash Fiction series, James Thomas, Sherrie Flick, and John Dufresne have searched far and wide for the most distinctive American voices in short-short fiction. The 73 stories collected here speak to the diversity of the American experience and range from the experimental to the narrative, from the whimsical to the gritty. Featuring fiction from writers both established and new, including Aimee Bender, K-Ming Chang, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Bryan Washington, Robert Scotellaro, and Luis Alberto Urrea, Flash Fiction America is a brilliant collection, radiating creativity and bringing together some of the most compelling and exciting contemporary writers in the United States.

I Hear You're Rich

I Hear You're Rich PDF

Author: Diane Williams

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1641294787

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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.

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams PDF

Author: Diane Williams

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 785

ISBN-13: 1616959851

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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.”

Vacation

Vacation PDF

Author: Deb Olin Unferth

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2010-03-22

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 0802197876

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An “enthralling headscratcher of a first novel . . . weaves an intricate tale of quests and escapes” as a man follows his wife who follows a mysterious stranger (Publishers Weekly). Deb Olin Unferth’s award-winning debut novel is “an off-kilter ode to obsession” with a “richly textured, often surprising linguistic landscape” (The Rumpus). In it, a man named Myers has noticed that his wife has suddenly become suspiciously absent in the evenings. He decides to start following her on her evening escapades, hoping to discover her betrayal. Instead, he soon discovers she is following a man named Gray, who happens to be a former classmate of Myers, and whose own marriage is falling apart. What follows is an unusual, unsettling, and wildly entertaining novel by the acclaimed author of Minor Robberies. With deadpan humor and skewed wordplay, Deb Olin Unferth weaves a mystery of hope and heartbreak. Winner of the Cabell First Novel Award.

Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty

Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty PDF

Author: Diane Williams

Publisher: McSweeney's

Published: 2012-01-17

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1936365715

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In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams's unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire—are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence. These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling—the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams' position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.

How High?--That High

How High?--That High PDF

Author: Diane Williams

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1641293071

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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.