Diane Williams is an American author, primarily of short stories. She lives in New York City and is the founder and editor of the literary annualNOON. She is the author of nine books, including The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, published by Soho Press in 2018.
A profile of Williams appeared in The New York Times in 2018, coincident with the publication of The Collected Stories of Diane Williams. Rumaan Alam wrote: "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." Elsewhere, Williams' collected works was featured in The New York Review of Books, where Merve Emre wrote: " 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. You don't have to read all three hundred and five stories to get the point." Maggie Doherty in The New Republic said, "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." In The Paris Review Williams was referred to as "the godmother of flash fiction." Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine was published by McSweeney's in 2016. The Millions and Flavorwire listed it as one of the most anticipated books of 2016, and it received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Her book, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, was published by McSweeney's in January 2012. The Boston Globe said "Vicky Swanky' is Williams at her best, shaking us awake again to the persistent strangeness of human life." Vanity Fair wrote "The shorts in Diane Williams' Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty emit an unsettling brilliance, becoming, on repeated readings, even stranger and more revelatory." Ben Marcus says of this work: "The uncanny has met its ideal delivery system: the stories of Diane Williams." Her 2007 collection, It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, was released by Fiction Collective Two. In 2001, Dalkey published Romancer Erector: "Crafty, screwball, profound describes Diane Williams's Romancer Erector a trio of novellas and dozens of short stories featuring playful titles like 'I Freshly Fleshly'". In 2012, Romancer Erector was translated into the Swedish by Niclas Nilsson as Romantikus Erector, and published by Orosdi-Back. Torbjorn Elensky comments in that "Anyone who writes or who is interested in prose as an art form should spend some time with her work. But even if you don't write, you should read her. The only thing you risk is that much of the supposedly poetic prose being published these days will seem flat after a few rounds with Diane Williams. Her books have been reviewed in many publications, including the New York Times Book Review and The Los Angeles Times Jonathan Franzen describes her as "one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird." Ben Marcus suggested that her "outrageous and ferociously strange stories test the limits of behavior, of manners, of language, and mark Diane Williams as a startlingly original writer worthy of our closest attention." Williams was the publisher and co-editor of StoryQuarterly from 1985 to 1997. She has been the publisher and founding editor of NOON since 2000. In January 2016, Rachel Syme of The New York Times described it as "a beautiful annual that remains staunchly avant-garde in its commitment to work that is oblique, enigmatic and impossible to ignore...stories that leave a flashbulb's glow behind the eyes even as they resist sense." On October 30, 2009, The Times Literary Supplement reviewed NOON in its Learned Journals. Alison Kelly wrote,
Books
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
Romancer Erector ,
It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature: A Novella and Stories.
Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine ,
The Collected Stories of Diane Williams , ; includes stories from the above volumes and 16 newer stories
