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THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DIANE WILLIAMS

Name: THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DIANE WILLIAMS
Author: Diane Williams
ISBN: 978-1-61695-982-1

by Diane Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2018

Fans of flash fiction will want to study at the feet of this master of the form.

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An omnibus of short-short fiction by sometimes-playful, sometimes-pensive avant-gardist Williams (Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, 2016, etc.).

Talk about economy of expression: This book clocks in at just shy of 800 pages and yet contains more than 300 short stories. At their best and most evocative, these stories are something between fairy tale and vignette, as with “Girl with a Pencil,” which suggests that the child is mother to the woman by means of art and storytelling: “And so was invented a kind of brute—a brunette with longish hair, who must love her enemies—who acts responsibly.” As Ben Marcus notes in a foreword, the mystery in Williams’ work often lies in the transitions, which we take to mean the largely unspoken connections from paragraph to paragraph. “All I remember is our kinship, which makes me sick,” says the narrator of a story scarcely more than a couple of hundred words long. “I have gone so very far to deny death.” She adds, after a beat and a paragraph break, “It is already only a memory.” What “it” refers to could be any number of antecedents, attaching each of which to the pronoun changes the story ever so slightly. It’s a nice trick, one that doesn’t boast. So is the close of a somber story that leaves one wondering at what the real ending might be: “I am angry toward the end of the day, but you won’t have to find out much about that.” Elsewhere the connections are unspoken even within paragraphs: “He stumbled. He fell down. I might have struck him, that’s why,” runs one paragraph in its entirety. There’s Laurel and Hardy slapstick in there—and menace, too. Although a couple of the more Dada-ish moments don’t quite work and a couple of puns (“I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted”) seem forced, it’s altogether a pleasure for readers attentive to both language and story.

Fans of flash fiction will want to study at the feet of this master of the form.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-61695-982-1

Page Count: 784

Publisher: Soho

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
I HEAR YOU'RE RICH
by Diane Williams

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW HIGH? THAT HIGH
by Diane Williams

- BOOK REVIEW
FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE
by Diane Williams

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.