Review
Praise for How High? — That High
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021
“I would describe Williams as the writer who saved my life—or my soul, if one believes such a thing exists . . . [Williams’] stories, many no longer than a page, suggest that what is left unsaid between people remains more powerful than what they have the capacity to articulate. Although Williams studied with Gordon Lish (and before that, with Philip Roth), her minimalism is distinctive for its sublimity and its spirituality, its ability to evoke the laws of a world apart.”
—Merve Emre, The New Yorker
“These 34 stories, however compressed, are rooted in the dramatic potential of extramarital affairs and erotic regret . . . 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 writes short stories that are dares. They dare to disorient, drawing near-subconscious connections between everyday happenings and emotional turmoil . . . [How High?—That High] creat[es] a unique headspace that invites revelation even as it playfully breaks the rules.”
—New York Journal of Books
“[Williams’ stories] don't stamp their feet. When they make music, they're not thumping. It's an internal music that is special to [Diane Williams].”
—Michael Silverblatt, KCRW’s Bookworm
“How High? — That High is challenging, surprising, unsettling, and very funny.”
—Southwest Review
“A true master of the short story format, How High? — That High showcases author and storyteller Diane Williams’ genuine flair for originality coupled with an unsurpassed literary skill and talent for narrative driven stories and memorably crafted characters.”
—Midwest Book Review, Wisconsin Bookwatch
“The new stories are like the old stories in the pleasures they deliver, starting with Williams’s irresistible, inimitable opening sentences . . . How High? – That High is a slyly amusing book; even the darker stories veer into humor.”
—BOMB Magazine
“Each short story in the collection depicts ordinary moments we've all experienced, but Williams fully dissects each scene to reveal the emotions and meaning tucked into the fabric of the everyday. The collection can't help but leave you wondering what it means to be human.”
—VERANDA
“To take How High?—That High onto a subway or beach is to risk missing your stop, or a coming tsunami.”
—The Millions
“Diane Williams’ writing is like a fine wine; you’re enchanted by the first sip, and it only gets better with age . . . [These stories] cover your everyday mundanities, but the magic is in her ability to turn a phrase, to surprise on the sentence-level.”
—LitHub
“Evading the constraints of typical short fiction, How High? — That High . . . challenge[s] convention with fervor. Williams’ willful brevity and tantalizing obscurity make How High? a subversive puzzle box that dismantles standard notions of characterization and storytelling with deft precision . . . [Williams’] preoccupation with form is a testament to her abiding love of the craft, as well as a reminder that craft’s greatest enemy is always staidness.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Diane Williams probes the depths of human relationships in this humorous and sensitive collection . . . We are not alone. Williams shows that through her stories. It’s up to the reader to fill in the rest.”
—BookBrowse
“Williams is a magician of the miniature . . . Brief, elliptical, steeped in longing—or is that lust?—[these stories] offer slices of life that rely on interior more than exterior details, which is to say they are small road maps of the soul . . . [Williams' stories] are rigorous in both language and emotion, using nuance and inference to explore the implications, the contradictions, that people rarely share aloud . . . Williams’ small gems are as dense and beautiful as diamonds, compressed from the carbon of daily life.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Some of the pieces in How High?—That High, such as ‘A Type of Vertigo’ and ‘Popping,’ are vivid portraits in miniature, and tornado-like in the way that Williams bears down to reveal only a moment or two in a fully imagined life. The effect leaves her characters and readers stunned . . . After 30 years of work, some writers grow lazy; Williams has grown more potent, like the venom of certain snakes.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Every word matters in these micro entries, and ‘Finished Being’ is among the collection’s most impressive feats, packing a book’s worth of mystery and emotion into a single sentence . . . Despite their small slivers of space, [these stories] have outsized emotional and intellectual impacts.”
—Foreword Reviews
Praise for The Collected Stories of Diane Williams
“Erudite, elegant and stubbornly experimental. For any writer, an omnibus collection is a triumph. To see years of Ms. Williams’ confounding fictions collected in so hefty a volume is like seeing snowflakes accrue into an avalanche.”
—The New York Times
“This book will rewire your brain.”
—NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour
“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
“Full of funny, libidinal and invigorating enigmas . . . Readers who love the arresting phrase, the surprising word, will gravitate to her . . . It’s perfect to leave on the bedside table, to be consulted before one’s dreamlife begins.”
—The London Review of Books
“Williams can do more with two sentences than most writers can do with two hundred pages.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Savage, wild, sideways stories flirt with reality and sever you from your roots, only to bring you back changed.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for Diane Williams
"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
“Flash fictions that are often beautiful but impenetrable, structured like little riddles to unspool. While it is easy to compare Williams' work to that of Lydia Davis, another expert writer of absurdist shorts, this collection stands in its own category as defiantly whimsical and weird . . . Williams creates stories that can be consumed in small bites. But she provides enough material in each to chew over for an entire meal.”
—The New York Times
“One of America's most exciting violators of habit.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Let's hear it for the magnificent Diane Williams, one of the wittiest and most exacting writers of our time. Her fictions are fervid endorsements of terrible, joyous life. But that's not quite right, because like all great literature, they are life.”
—Sam Lipsyte
“Diane Williams is hilarious, brilliant, eccentric, powerful, and, luckily, ours.”
—Deb Olin Unferth
“Discomfitingly and devastatingly funny, Williams upends the mundane, the painful, and the unusual, resulting—much in the way an art teacher might ask her class to copy a photograph upside-down—in precision and clarity.”
—Elle
About the Author
Diane Williams is the founder and editor of the distinguished literary annual, NOON, the archive of which, as well as Williams's personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library. She is the author of ten volumes of short fiction and the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. She lives in New York City.
Xe Sands has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art, including recordings of the Nightwalkersseries from Jaquelyn Frank. She has received several honors, including AudioFileEarphones Awards and a coveted Audie Award, and she was named Favorite Debut Romance Narrator of 2011 in the Romance Audiobooks poll.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
UPPER LOOP
I am trying to think if there’s any reason for having fun anymore on any level? I know that that’s not the kind of thing people usually talk about. God forbid—so I scale the roof all the way to the ridge and I have never had to climb down.
GARDEN MAGIC
I took a step further to meet Horace for health, for love, for a leg up.
And at Horace’s everything was gray there with some white accents—and the walls were gray, not paint. They were hung with fabric and he had a gray carpet on the floor.
Once, before I knew him well, I asked Horace to dinner and after that he was always saying that he’d be right over for a chicken dinner, but usually I visited him in his apartment across the street.
His place was very tidy and a bit surprising. He showed me his sword cane and his living room features an owl that’s made of poultry feathers.
This is a snowy owl that contains no real owl parts, but when I saw it for the first time—I had to ask whether it had been shot or euthanized.
We got married and I should explain that I am tiny—a kind of skinny woman.
You see, Horace says he likes to think of me as a young sailor boy or he may refer to me as a china doll and, for short, call me China.
I moved in with him, and not long after, we waited in line to see the Czech film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.
And when we both saw Lila Melinek in the line up ahead, Horace stuck a finger between the cheeks of my backside.
Even with my coat on, I was very much aware of the point of pressure.
One day Lila forced her way into our apartment while I sat alone in another room. It was a bold and moody time.
I heard Lila tell Horace, “The trouble with you!”
“I’ll try to be a better friend,” Horace told her, “but I need to be with someone who knows French.”
I am that one. Oh, otherwise I heard murmurs and I did walk in to join them where they sat.
Lila’s hair hung down her back and I’d like to offer more about her, but I don’t know what that would be. She is better than me?
I put myself into a chair and watched them, except some of the time I kept an eye on the owl who also pressed on my nerves.
“When can you go?” I asked her.
“I’ll return,” she said, and she stood.
And she’s not meek, but still she’s waifish, with babyish hands and oversize antlike eyes.
I had the impression that Lila wanted to belong to our family and in several ways Lila and I are likely alike, although I’m not one to
come up with plausible ideas of myself.
Horace said, after she’d left us, “She’s my Georgia peach. What do you want for me?” That’s what I thought he said. But what he said was, “What do you want from me?”
Well, she did take him away when she came again.
I am in a room with . . . I am in a room where decisions are unlikely to be thought out, where I lack strong enough character and vital drive to take my dark thoughts and plant them at the right time like spring bulbs.
GRIEF IN MODERATION
A necessary and great object of interest—he had first found Valentina standing among other members of her family.
Her clothes were a shocking pink color and as her wet hair dried, it began beguilingly to curl.
And she was fragrant and Tom thought she was showy. She is not common in the wild.
And lots of other people still go up to her and consider her the way Tom does.
Most persistently, she brings into view a face that displays full-bodied welcome.
One weekday evening, in a local restaurant, a very tall drunk man walked over to the pair, kissed Valentina on the mouth, and then departed quickly.
Tom had questions. It was a puzzling capper to a typical day.
Tom, on that day at work, had closed out tax cases upon which no tax was due, and awaited a repairman to discuss the photocopier failure.
And Valentina has responsibility for all of the patients on her hospital shift, as well as the building, and people are responsive to her, sometimes fervently.
She did not respond, however, to Tom’s questions. She kept at her meat. She might otherwise have been caught in contradictions, but then she backed up in her chair and she gave her husband her answers: But it isn’t true.
I don’t recall. Sort of. Yes, I sometimes do.
At bedtime Valentina lay on her back, arms at her sides, as did Tom. There was no intertwining and no tender touch that needed to become better still, except that their small-patterned wallpaper seemed to be excited the next morning.
The tiny daisies were scored by the shadows of the slats of the venetian blinds and the stripes were shivering.
And here at dawn was Valentina’s instrumental smile! Her sign of sweetness that is the flying start, the fresh impetus, the feature on her face that creates her particular style.
And in theory she well understands any person’s right to have privacy; to challenge and to complain without fear of reprisal; to make known his or her wishes; to receive complete information. To be wrenched.
