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I Liked Rex

I Liked Rex

by Diane Williams, introduction by Merve Emre

$16.95
$16.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Short Stories / Anthologies
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The September selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230816
Pages: 144
Publication Date:

Praise

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.
—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 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

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

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

[Diane Williams's] stories are little shards of magic, her pieces etched into glass rather than scribbled on paper.
—McKayla Coyle, LitHub

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