The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together over three hundred new and previously published short fictions–distilled works of unsettling brilliance (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of the American short story. From Ben Marcus’s introduction to The Collected Stories of Diane Williams: Diane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, most of them no more than a page long. She’s a hero of the form: the sudden fiction, the flash fiction, whatever it’s being called these days by the genre naming conglomerate. The stories are short. They defy logic. They thumb their nose at conventional sense, or even unconventional sense. But if sense is in short supply in these texts, that leaves more room for splendor and sorrow and insight. Note: Due to licensing conflicts, a small selection of stories from this collection that appeared previously in the collection Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine (McSweeney’s, 2016) do not appear in this audio recording.