I Liked Rex

From "the godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), a new collection of thirty-six cunning, captivating short stories about the mysteries of life and the human heart. "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 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 is Williams's newest collection, which explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive. In these stories, a woman sees her soon-to-be ex-husband on the street, walking patiently at the end of a line of geese; a mother implores a total stranger to watch over her small child at the beach; a guest arrives at an orgy uninvited, and takes a nap beneath a dusty carpet; a woman reflects on her life with a man who used to belong to another, but is hers now--though can anyone really possess anyone else, truly? 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 sphinx-like 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.