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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Oct 2021, 128 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2022, 128 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rory L. Aronsky
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Diane Williams, an American master of the short story who will "rewire your brain" (NPR), is back with a collection in which she once again expands the possibilities of fiction.
These stories depict ordinary moments—a visit to the doctor's office or a married couple's hundredth dance together—but within the quotidian, Williams delivers a lifetime of insecurities, lusts, rejections, and revelations, making her work equally discomfiting and amusing. With unmatched wit in every sentence, Williams captures whole universes in a story, delivering visionary insights into what it means to be human.
Williams' devotees will be newly enthralled by her elegantly strange, bewitching stories in How High? — That High. Those who have yet to meet "the godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review) will find an extraordinary introduction in these pages.
These stories appear in How High? — That High by Diane Williams, published by Soho Press (2021).
STICK
How best to touch these woody objects or a person?
She batted together the parts of the sycamore stick she had broken in two and then made of them the self-important capital letter T—and she spun one.
She rolled the stick over her thumb and then she tried for greater twirling speed, as she sat on the park bench that bore a personalized inscribed plaque dedicated to MY DEAREST NANCY.
She is not that Nancy, nor is she a beloved Lara yet, who might have a plan that aims to shore up her heart and her strength, with tools and accessories that support her life in the early-evening-burning-summertime in the city.
Just do it, she thought, and she put the stick through its paces again. Its athleticism, its success, it seemed to her, could foretell her own. So that it pained her when she had to throw the sticks away.
She stood suddenly to walk on, but instead paused to watch ...
Williams examines her characters' lives with the storytelling equivalent of a jeweler's loupe, looking at distinctly individual moments that are common to all of us, but not often thought of in the way she presents them, because we're so busy. She is an interesting storyteller working in the genre of flash fiction. The questions she poses point to our basic humanity in its innumerable shades...continued
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(Reviewed by Rory L. Aronsky).
Hey, wait! Where are you going? This isn't going to be a long article. I promise!
In fact, it may well be as short as a piece of flash fiction, which sounds like a creation for the age of Twitter, but actually goes much further back. At least as far back as around 600 BCE when many of the tales attributed to Aesop are believed to have originated.
These fables, as well as the myths found in the Iliad and the Odyssey and elsewhere, are short enough to give the reader pause. Just one line could take on new life in the mind, picking up where an author left off, a kind of calisthenics for the imagination.
In the 19th century, authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin and Ambrose Bierce experimented with the form....
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