“Is this America’s smartest—strangest—short-story writer?” —Leo Robson, The Telegraph
“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
“Folktales that hammer like a nail gun.” —Rob Walker, The Dallas Morning News
“One of America’s most exciting violators of habit.” —Matthew Sharpe, Lost Angeles Times
“The godmother of flash fiction.” —The Paris Review
“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
“[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…. Williams can do more with two sentences than most writers can do with two hundred pages.” —Merve Emre, The New York Review of Books
“I’m convinced that Williams—as a writer and as an editor—has access to some hidden, ancient source of energy and inspiration…. She gives attentive readers the sense that anything in life can be written about in a dynamic, heroic way. The horizon expands with limitless possibility—the most sublime gift.” —Kathryn Scanlan, Southwest Review
“Delightful characters, curious images, and love affairs gone awry animate [I Liked Rex] . . . These deceptively simple stories eschew linear plots to home in on arresting images and phrases that reveal their characters’ complex and resonant inner lives . . . This is one to savor.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
