Copyright © 2018 by Diane Williams

Introduction copyright © 2018 by Ben Marcus

 

The stories in this collection were originally published, sometimes in different form, in the following volumes: This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate © 1990 by Diane Williams and published by Grove Weidenfeld.
Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear
© 1992 by Diane Williams and published by Grove Weidenfeld.
The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella © 1996 by Diane Williams and published by Alfred A. Knopf. Excitability: Selected Stories © 1998 by Diane Williams and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Romancer Erector: Novella and Stories © 2001 by Diane Williams and published by Dalkey Archive Press. It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature: A Novella and Stories © 2007 by Diane Williams and published by FC2, an imprint of The University of Alabama Press. Reprinted with permission of The University of Alabama Press. Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty © 2012 by Diane Williams and published by McSweeney’s. Reprinted with permission of McSweeney’s. Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine © 2016 by Diane Williams and published by McSweeney’s. Reprinted with permission of McSweeney’s.

New stories in this collection first appeared, sometimes in different form, in the

following journals and anthologies: “The Beauty and the Bat,” “Witchcraft Today,”

“The Fucking Lake,” and “Day of Awe” in Granta; “The Forgotten Story” in Five

Points; “Don’t Talk to Him for Such a Long Time,” “Happy Presence, Timeless

Inspiration,” “The Perverted Message,” and “The Hours of Coincidence” in Harper’s;

“Oh, Darling I’m in the Garden” in The London Review of Books, reprinted in The

Best Small Fictions 2018, Braddock Avenue Books; “The Sure Cure” in McSweeney’s;

“Grace God” in The Lifted Brow; and “The Important Transport” in Egress.

 

All rights reserved.

 

Jacket painting reproduced with permission from
The Croatian Museum of Naïve Art and Damir Rabuzin:
Ivan Rabuzin On the Hills – Primeval Forest, 1960, oil on canvas, 692 x 1167 mm,
Collection: The Croatian Museum of Naïve Art, Zagreb, Croatia.

Published by Soho Press, Inc.

853 Broadway New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Diane.

Title: The collected stories of Diane Williams / Diane Williams ;

introduction by Ben Marcus.

I. Title.

PS3573.I44846 A6 2018 813’.54—dc23 2018027943

ISBN 978-1-61695-982-1

eISBN 978-1-61695-983-8

Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

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