I Liked Rex - by Diane Williams (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From "the godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), a new collection of thirty-six cunning, captivating short stories about the mysteries of life and the human heart.

"One of America's most exciting violators of habit." --Los Angeles Times

"Fiction ought to lead us to those precipices where language fails and silence begins. You would be well advised, with a master like Williams, to take the plunge." --The New York Times

Diane Williams is one of the great masters of the American short story: her tiny, coruscating tales are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature. I Liked Rex explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive. Williams's genius lies as much in what is left unspoken as in what is laid out on the page; behind images of startling beauty and strangeness, entire chamber dramas of the heart unfold, and the pleasure of these sphinxlike tales comes from their unremitting mystery, which is the same mystery fundamental to life and to love. A collection of rare originality and daring, I Liked Rex is a complete and utter delight.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Diane Williams is the author of several collections of short fiction and the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. An omnibus of her work, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, was published in 2018. I Liked Rex is her twelfth book of fiction. The NOON archive, as well as Williams's personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library. She lives in New York City.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America and The Ferrante Letters. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.