I Liked Rex

Diane Williams is one of the most consistently compelling and original writers of short fiction working today. The thirty-six new stories in I Liked Rex are essentially mystical, showing the potential for revelation in everyday subject matters - desire, money, family or work. Williams has an extraordinary ear for the rhythms of speech, and an unerring instinct for the crucial detail, the startling turn that allows her to unfold the life of a character, or the history of a relationship, in a few brief sentences. These stories are as uncanny as they are delightful.

In her introduction, Merve Emre calls Diane Williams's work 'the last laugh of modernism's avant-garde, a comic blend of Stein's rigor, Barnes's decadence, and Stevens's philosophical grandeur, laced with a cheerful frankness that belongs to Williams, and Williams alone.'