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

Diane Williams is the author of Romance Erector, Excitability: Selected Stories, The Stupefaction, Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear, and This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate. She is the editor of the literary annual NOON.

In It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, Williams's short, precise, and emphatic sentences build a strange society whose denizens are not quite familiar to us and not quite comfortable with their own quietly disturbing evolutions. 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 ""With the uproarious rudeness of a great mind, Diane Williams writes surprise after surprise, radically reinvented, indecorous and daring and downright funny stories."" - Christine Schutt ""Diane Williams's singular, unsettling genius has never been as memorably and heart-rendingly evident as in this virtuosic new collection of richly gnomic fictions that are, as always, sublimely vital in every line."" - Gary Lurz ""Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird."" - Jonathan Franzen ""These 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."" - Ben Marcus