It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature

by Diane Williams

Overview

This work by Diane Williams delves into the strange relationships of men and women. From marital betrayal to spousal abuse and unrelenting desire, Williams illuminates the lives of her characters in prose as sparse and stark as it is beautiful. These stories are as short as prose poems and as complex as novels. In them, meanings remain ambiguous and consequences seem uncertain. In the novella “On Sexual Strength” she describes the intense and sometimes strange relationship between two neighboring couples and the rage that comes with adultery, and a narrator whose social inadequacies and lack of inhibitions lead to destruction.   The world Williams creates is a sensual place where quiet epiphanies—such as   the one that occurs after an extramarital affair— are also possible: “It was like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted nature. This is how love can be featured.” Such flashes of insight and emotion glue together the fragments of life Williams lays before the reader, and the reader rejoices at the revelations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817380519
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	10/15/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	640 KB

About the Author

SRDP 4

Table of Contents

Contents On Sexual Strength (a novella) Sweet The Ring Stuck On I Was Very Hungry A Dramatic Classic Leap A Thousand Groans I Hope You Will Be More Tip Top Well, Well, Well, Well, Well Everybody's Syrup The Easiest Way of Having The Glam Bird The Life of Any Cook What a Great Man Learned About Reflection and Emotion Rice Stronger Than a Man, Simpler Than a Woman These Blenches Gave My Heart The Lesser Passage Room The Facts About Telling Character Flower Doodia Handy-Dandy Aggressive Glass and Mirrors Time-Consuming Striking Combinations Both My Wife and I Were Very Well Satisfied She Began Baby Flourishes Opening the Closing Mouth of the Woman The King Emperor Please Let Me Out Again of the Small Plugged Hole The Philadelphia Story Eat the Deep Too Cutting and Dressing Dangeresque Jewish Folktale To Squeeze Water Jessamine, Ewing, Erastus, and Keane Her Leg Inspiring One The Widow and the Hamburger Satisfying, Exciting, Superb Affection Other Rash

Editorial Reviews

Diane Williams reminds me a little of Jane Bowles, a little of Laura Riding. She is one of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing
something independent, energetic, heartfelt.”
—Lydia Davis


"With the uproarious rudeness of a great mind, Diane Williams writes surprise after surprise, radically reinvented, indecorous and daring and downright funny
stories."
—Christine Schutt


“Diane Williams’s singular, unsettling genius has never been as memorably and heartrendingly evident as in this virtuosic new collection of richly gnomic
fictions that are, as always, sublimely vital in every line.”
—Gary Lutz


“Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird.”
—Jonathan Franzen


“These outrageous and ferociously strange stories test the limits of behavior, of manners, of language, and mark Diane Williams as a startlingly original writer
worthy of our closest attention.”
—Ben Marcus

From the Publisher

One of America's most exciting violators of habit is [Diane] Williams... the extremity that Williams depicts and the extremity of the depiction evoke something akin to the pity and fear that the great writers of antiquity considered central to literature. Her stories, by removing you from ordinary literary experience, place you more deeply in ordinary life. 'Isn't ordinary life strange?' they ask, and in so asking, they revivify and console.

The Los Angeles Times