Diane Williams with Jeannie Vanasco: I LIKED REX

Let's start with some of the titles from her 12th book, I Liked Rex: "No Heartburn, Flatulence, Nausea, or Muscular Cramps, Either" ; "Pleasure of the Day" ; "I Did Trip Over a Very Small Boy."

These stories follow about a 2-page journey, but make no mistake-- at the end you will not be at the same place you started. As Merve Emre says in the introduction to I Liked Rex: "One feels that [Williams] is often surprised--or perhaps terrified-- by the hidden currents of her own mind, and that her syntax lets those emotions find the surest path onto the page." This reason-- among many-- makes I Liked Rex one of the most anticipated Ivy staff picks of the fall.

Diane Williams has been crowned the founder of Flash Fiction. (We're curious to hear how she feels about that.) She's shaped an entire generation of writers through her magazine NOON: Lydia Davis, Danielle Dutton, Kathryn Scanlan, Rita Bullwinkel, and many more. And now, she'll be at Bird in Hand in Baltimore to tell us more-- joined by the exceptional writer and reader Jeannie Vanasco.

Order I LIKED REX here!

Diane Williams is the author of several collections of short fiction and the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. An omnibus of her work, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, was published in 2018. I Liked Rex is her twelfth book of fiction. The NOON archive, as well as Williams’s personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library. She lives in New York City.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs A Silent Treatment, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, and The Glass Eye, all published by Tin House. Her essays have appeared in The Believer, a McSweeney's anthology, The New York Times Magazine, and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University. Her fourth book is under contract with Tin House.