In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams's unsettling storiesa cryptic meeting between neighbours, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fireare narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence.These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawlingthe mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams' position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.
