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

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