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 stories — a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire — are 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 sprawling — the 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.