Vicky Swanky is a Beauty

One of the best writers in short fiction today, with her best collection yet. In "Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty", Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams' unsettling stories - a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire - are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence. These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling - the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, "Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty" cements Diane Williams' position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.

Diane Williams is the author of six books, including a collection of her selected stories. She is also the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. She lives in New York City.