‘Spry, sly, and spirited, Williams’ very short stories — most are a couple of pages long — are brilliantly unsettling … Williams’ clean sentences are uncluttered, but strangely surprising, and the stories themselves have mysterious depths, a teasing sense of meaning and connection that can never be quite explained or articulated.’
Eithne Farry, Daily Mail
‘[Williams] writes an unmistakable type of story: short, tightly wrought, each sentence a small masterpiece — a three-act play in miniature … With flying narrators and women whose hair drags on the floor as they walk, there’s something of Leonora Carrington’s visions about the stories.’
Francesca Peacock, The Spectator
‘As proved by I Hear You’re Rich, Diane Williams’s fiction, long beloved by those in the know, is joyful, unnerving, and linguistically spry.’
Leo Robson, The Telegraph
‘These 33 stories, a few as short as a paragraph, pack inordinate complexity into tiny spaces and take unpredictable turns toward unexpected conclusions … From the elusiveness of love to the desire for escape, the themes here are hard to mine in flash fiction. That Williams does so is a tribute to her talent.’
Shelf Awareness, starred review
‘You can always count on Diane Williams, head literary weirdo and “godmother of flash fiction” for a good time — if you consider having your mind blown to be a good time, which you should. Her latest book has 33 short pieces guaranteed to shift the world around you, if only for a moment.’
Lit Hub
‘Williams explores the pleasures and disappointments of adulthood in this distinctive collection … Williams’ blend of precision and understatement make her insights on her characters’ fears and limitations cut deeply while leaving the stories open to interpretation. This will leave readers aching in all the best ways.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Miniscule stories from a master of the form … It’s nearly impossible to categorise Williams’ work. She interrogates both the mundane and the metaphysical. In story after story, she upends what readers have grown to expect from traditional narratives — a beginning, middle, and end, to say the least — sometimes leaving us without any of those elements at all. A Williams story might be made up of a fragment of dialogue, a thought, a description, or some combination of these … Mysterious, gemlike, and strange.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Williams’s sentences are syntactically flexible, spasmodic, surprising … Flip to a random page and you’ll likely find at least one question. The world for Williams’s characters is an endlessly baffling place — which might be another way of saying it’s endlessly interesting.’
Southwest Review
‘It takes a master of the short story form to craft truly incisive slice-of-life fiction, and Diane Williams proves that she’s among the best with her latest collection, I Hear You’re Rich… In each brief story, we see the entirety of the human experience bubbling underneath.’
West Trade Review
‘The short stories in Williams’ eleventh collection — I Hear You’re Rich— are some of her very best. Alluring and allusive, the 33 beautifully wrought literary miniatures in this volume — the shortest of which is a single sentence of 23 words — are characteristically attuned to what Williams describes as “those exigencies, calamities that underpin everyday life”. Taken together, these distinctive — and sometimes surprisingly comedic — stories confirm Williams is indeed one of the most important US writers working today.’
Alexander Howard, The Conversation
‘You might call Diane Williams’s plots dreamlike — they proceed according to their own mysterious logic, interrupting themselves — but they’re not hazy … [Williams] turn[s] the everyday stuff of realist fiction into props for existential fun houses … I Hear You’re Rich will please fans of Lydia Davis and David Lynch.’
Vulture
‘Stories that offer glimpses into the mundane and exhilarating beauty of everyday life.’
The Millions
‘Williams delights … What a treat! Life is rendered immediate and fresh through her eyes as she takes on the simplest of subjects — affairs, a request for money, the act of carrying a cake — with precision and gusto.’
RUSSH Magazine
Praise for How High? — That High:
‘Williams is a magician of the miniature … Don’t let their diminutive stature fool you: These pieces pack a punch. Brief, elliptical, steeped in longing — or is that lust? — they offer slices of life that rely on interior more than exterior details, which is to say they are small road maps of the soul … All the pieces here … are rigorous in both language and emotion, using nuance and inference to explore the implications, the contradictions, that people rarely share aloud … Williams’ small gems are as dense and beautiful as diamonds, compressed from the carbon of daily life.’
Kirkus Reviews
Praise for How High? — That High:
‘Williams returns with a collection showcasing her mastery of succinct and suggestive stories … Williams’ prose evokes both strangeness and familiarity as she gets at the core of what it means to live into one’s later years. This is by no means for everyone, but it will surely satisfy fans of well-wrought fiction.’
Publishers Weekly
Praise for The Collected Stories of Diane Williams:
‘Erudite, elegant and stubbornly experimental. For any writer, an omnibus collection is a triumph. To see years of Ms Williams’ confounding fictions collected in so hefty a volume is like seeing snowflakes accrue into an avalanche.’
Rumaan Alam, The New York Times
Praise for The Collected Stories of Diane Williams:
‘Full of funny, libidinal and invigorating enigmas … Readers who love the arresting phrase, the surprising word, will gravitate to her … It’s perfect to leave on the bedside table, to be consulted before one’s dreamlife begins.’
Ange Mlinko, The London Review of Books
