Diane Williams - The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

Also by diane williams

This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul,
the World, Time, and Fate

Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories
in Which God Might Choose to Appear

The Stupefaction

Excitability: Selected Stories 19861996

Romancer Erector

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

Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty

Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine

C opyright 2018 by Diane Williams

I ntroduction copyright 2018 by Ben Marcus

T he stories in this collection were originally published, sometimes in different form, in the following volumes: This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate 1990 by Diane Williams and published by Grove Weidenfeld.
Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear
1992 by Diane Williams and published by Grove Weidenfeld.
The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella 1996 by Diane Williams and published by Alfred A. Knopf. Excitability: Selected Stories 1998 by Diane Williams and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Romancer Erector: Novella and Stories 2001 by Diane Williams and published by Dalkey Archive Press. It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature: A Novella and Stories 2007 by Diane Williams and published by FC2, an imprint of The University of Alabama Press. Reprinted with permission of The University of Alabama Press. Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty 2012 by Diane Williams and published by McSweeneys. Reprinted with permission of McSweeneys. Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine 2016 by Diane Williams and published by McSweeneys. Reprinted with permission of McSweeneys.

N ew stories in this collection first appeared, sometimes in different form, in the

f ollowing journals and anthologies: The Beauty and the Bat, Witchcraft Today,

The Fucking Lake, and Day of Awe in Granta ; The Forgotten Story in Five

P oints ; Dont Talk to Him for Such a Long Time, Happy Presence, Timeless

I nspiration, The Perverted Message, and The Hours of Coincidence in Harpers ;

Oh, Darling Im in the Garden in The London Review of Books , reprinted in The

B est Small Fictions 2018 , Braddock Avenue Books; The Sure Cure in McSweeneys ;

Grace God in The Lifted Brow ; and The Important Transport in Egress .

A ll rights reserved.

J acket painting reproduced with permission from
The Croatian Museum of Nave Art and Damir Rabuzin:
Ivan Rabuzin On the Hills Primeval Forest , 1960, oil on canvas, 692 x 1167 mm,
Collection: The Croatian Museum of Nave Art, Zagreb, Croatia.

P ublished by Soho Press, Inc.

53 Broadway New York, NY 10003

L ibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

W illiams, Diane.

T itle: The collected stories of Diane Williams / Diane Williams ;

introduction by Ben Marcus.

I . Title.

P S3573.I44846 A6 2018 813.54dc23 2018027943

I SBN 978-1-61695-982-1

e ISBN 978-1-61695-983-8

I nterior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

P rinted in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ON DIANE WILLIAMS BY BEN MARCUS

D iane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, most of them no more than a page long. Shes a hero of the form: the sudden fiction, the flash fiction, whatever its 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 bottledon the other hand, it should also be regulated and maybe rationed, because its severe. Its a rare feeling her stories trigger, but its a keen and deep and welcome one, the sort of feeling that wakes us up to complication and beauty and dissonance and fragility. Its a sensation we can only get by reading (thats the only place Ive ever found it), and once youve had it you want to keep having it again and again. This feeling avows the complexity of life, it does not flinch from our harder suspicions about how vulnerable and brutal our enterprise is. Such work feelsI dont know how else to say itbrave. It is difficult to encounter the world as it is experienced by Diane Williams, but this difficulty seems necessary.

So how does she do it? What is this literary approach? What is her trick?

Williams unusual literary method reveals the thin rigging of most narrative, and then deploys that rigging to make spectacular shapesabstract, maybe, or realistic, who can say? Every shape is abstract in the end, and every shape is familiar and intimate in the right context. Yes, shes using the tools of narrative, and her language often is plain in that it sounds spoken rather than labored-over and page bound. Theres a Dick and Jane quality to the prose, if Dick and Jane had been forcibly drowned and then brought back to life, maybe starved for a while, induced with madness but warned, at pain of death, to conceal it.

The conventional narrative tools Williams uses to bring her fiction to life are disfigured here. It would seem that shes melted them down and made them into new weapons. Sharper, weirder, more brutal. They get the job done and they make a kind of bloodsport out of the domestic scenes she so often creates. We recognize this sort of fictional materialfamilies in crisis, romantic partners at each others throatsbut there is so much that is creepily detuned, so much that is just alien and odd. These mad, unsettling texts wear the costume of short fiction but that costume has been torn up and sewn back together. A stitch-work disguise, a masquerade. Is it poetry, what she does? Is it prose, is it magic, is it biological weaponry? Is it real, is it a sham? Well, yes to all of these questions. Yes, I think so.

These are some of the most defiantly resistant texts (resistant to easy understanding, I mean) that I have read, even while they seduce and beckon. They are intimate and dark and intense, often, but they remain cryptic and removed, as if they are being told in a language we dont quite speak, or as if they are driven by a deeper code that we cant crack, a code that governs the composition of these stories and determines what they will be and how they will operate.

Ive been a pusher of Diane Williams work since her first book came out in 1990. Youd think I would have developed a slicker pitch about it by now, a quicker sell. Youd think. But woe to anyone who tries to summarize the uncanny attacks on reason that constitute this body of work. And yet it is still tempting to try to make sense of it all, not just because most of us are doomed to hunt for sense, to douse ourselves with certainties and clear points and meaning. Its that the stories themselves flirt so wickedly with sense but rarely quite build it, rarely quite commit to an entirely coherent scene or moment in narrative time. This is part of the shock to reading Diane Williams for the first time. Her stories end so soon after theyve begun, and we readers are thrust back into ourselves to wonder and worry. What was that we just read? What did it mean? What happened? What was it about? Each sentence becomes a piece of evidence, designed to mislead as much as it is designed to clarify. On the one hand these stories would seem to give so little, at least in the quantitative sense. Yet how is it that they resonate so profoundly? How is it that they endure?