"Diane Williams's singular, unsettling genius has never been as memorably and heartrendingly evident as in this virtuosic new collection of richly gnomic fictions that are, as always, sublimely vital in every line."
—Gary Lutz

"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

This newest work by Diane Williams delves into the strange relationships of men and women. From marital betrayal to spousal abuse and unrelenting desire, Williams illuminates the lives of her characters in prose as sparse and stark as it is beautiful. These stories are as short as prose poems and as complex as novels. In them, meanings remain ambiguous and consequences seem uncertain. In the novella On Sexual Strength she describes the intense and sometimes strange relationship between two neighboring couples and the rage that comes with adultery, and a narrator whose social inadequacies and lack of inhibitions lead to destruction.

The world Williams creates is a sensual place where quiet epiphanies—such as the one that occurs after an extramarital affair—are also possible: It was like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted nature. This is how love can be featured. Such flashes of insight and emotion glue together the fragments of life Williams lays before the reader, and the reader rejoices at the revelations.

Diane Williams is the author of Romancer Erector Excitability, 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.