I Liked Rex

by Diane Williams, Merve Emre (Introduction)

From “the godmother of flash fiction” (The Paris Review), a new collection of thirty-six cunning, captivating short stories about the mysteries of life and the human heart.

“One of America’s most exciting violators of habit.” —Los Angeles Times

“Fiction ought to lead us to those precipices where language fails and silence begins. You would be well advised, with a master like Williams, to take the plunge.” —The New York Times

Diane Williams is one of the great masters of the American short story: her tiny, coruscating tales are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature. I Liked Rex is Williams’s newest collection, which explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive.

In these stories, a woman sees her soon-to-be ex-husband on the street, walking patiently at the end of a line of geese; a mother implores a total stranger to watch over her small child at the beach; a guest arrives at an orgy uninvited, and takes a nap beneath a dusty carpet; a woman reflects on her life with a man who used to belong to another, but is hers now—though can anyone really possess anyone else, truly?

Williams’s genius lies as much in what is left unspoken as in what is laid out on the page; behind images of startling beauty and strangeness, entire chamber dramas of the heart unfold, and the pleasure of these sphinx-like tales comes from their unremitting mystery, which is the same mystery fundamental to life and to love. A collection of rare originality and daring, I Liked Rex is a complete and utter delight.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, The United States Of America, Literature

144 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2026

About the author

Diane Williams is an American author, primarily of short stories. She lives in New York City and is the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON (est. 2000). She has published 8 books and taught at Bard College, Syracuse University and The Center for Fiction in New York City.

Her books have been reviewed in many publications, including the New York Times Book Review ("An operation worthy of a master spy, a double agent in the house of fiction") and The Los Angeles Times ("One of America's most exciting violators of habit is [Diane] Williams…the extremity that Williams depicts and the extremity of the depiction evoke something akin to the pity and fear that the great writers of antiquity considered central to literature. Her stories, by removing you from ordinary literary experience, place you more deeply in ordinary life. 'Isn't ordinary life strange?' they ask, and in so asking, they revivify and console”).

Jonathan Franzen describes her as "one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird." Ben Marcus suggested that her "outrageous and ferociously strange stories test the limits of behavior, of manners, of language, and mark Diane Williams as a startlingly original writer worthy of our closest attention."

Reviews

[Bleah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea what was going on and I loved it

[Zoe Lask · Rating 4 out of 5]

If it works, it works. And this book worked for me

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a bit like a Rothko painting -- I think it either works for you or it doesn't. It works in spades for me. What Williams is able to do through the power of suggestion is basically miraculous. Unclear to me how she pulls off what she does here, which makes for a very exciting reading experience.

[Quinn Rennerfeldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I regret only just having discovered Diane Williams. Her fiction is absurd, disjointed, funny, detailed, and oddly-touching. A slightly more bizarre Lydia Davis-type. What a delight to know I have much more of her work to read.

[Martin Greenberg]

Got this in the NYRB book club subscription; I wouldn’t have purchased it on my own and I felt about how I expected I would feel about it. Going to leave this unrated this time after really slamming Williams’ last one — I just need to accept this is not for me. It’s not that it’s poorly executed, but I couldn’t get over wanting so badly for something - anything! - to happen or for the stories to try to build something more persistent than a whisper across an empty field. Perfectly done I feel like flash fiction should feel like a single page ripped from a larger work that gives you a glimpse into what feels like a much wider world behind the keyhole, but almost all of these feel like they start and end within these covers.

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m feeling like a curmudgeon these days: I don’t get flash fiction. It seeps through my mind like water in a sieve, leaving nothing but frustration that I can’t recall anything I’ve read.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lately I’ve been thinking of the film Friday the 13th Part XIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. The film is ostensibly marketed as Jason, freed from his woodsy Crystal Lake shackles, going on a rampage through the Big Apple. This, as any good viewer of the film will know, is not how things play out. In fact, the film only spends the last twenty minutes or so in NYC. The majority of its runtime and meek narrative output is spent on a ludicrous cruise ship for recent graduates of Crystal Lake High School. Everything about this setup is preposterous, ludicrous, and an utter abomination to the narrative conceit of the series. Crystal Lake is supposed to be somewhere in northern Jersey. Here it is rendered as a foggy, Vancouver-esque setting. Why and where would one take a lengthy cruise from this “Jersey” to NYC? Why does it look so chilly and late-autumnal in what is supposed to be graduation time (ostensibly June) for these seniors? It all doesn’t make sense! You get halfway through the movie and are wondering where the hell Manhattan is. And why is Jason not taking it for the love of christ? Why are there boys boxing on the cruise ship? And a discotheque? Why does the cruise ship invariably take on aspects of a freight ship at times, only good for transporting inanimate objects and material (which could describe characters therein and the narrative itself)? Why, when we finally get to NYC, is there not a better Subway scene? Why does NYC, apart from Times Square, look Vancouver-esque? Why bring Jason out of the woods and not really let him stalk the grime and concrete and neon of NYC circa 1989? Why is he on a ridiculous cruise ship for most of the movie? It all makes no sense, but it is very compelling. I have watched the film at least two dozen times in my life. I will voluntarily put it on, in fact. I know every scene, every tic, every wooden acting choice by heart. Which some might say is a waste of time and a sign of psychosis. And maybe it is. But each time I watch it, I feel as though I’m getting closer to why all this happened. Or, maybe more to the point, why some things didn’t happen.    

[Janine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This is the September 2026 New York Review Book (NYRB) Classic selection that arrived last week in my mail. Since it’s a rather short book and I hadn’t read a short story collection in a while, I thought I’d give it a go. However these aren’t short stories in the classic genre sense - they are mini stories, no more than three pages max and telling of situations that are unique, in the moment and bizarre at times. As the reader you have to read between the lines to surmise the story.

In the book’s Introduction, Merve Emre points out that Williams “has a passion for detail and a mean sense of metaphor.” Indeed most of these “flash fiction” - Williams is the “mother” of this new genre - are metaphors on life. The one I liked the best (maybe because I didn’t have to mull it over too long when I was done) was “The Great Experience” where a man mourns his divorce and Williams writes “The loss of paradise keeps happening.” Emre points to this sentence in her Introduction as well but in the context of being Williams’ writing theme. And this is somewhat true because her stories seem to end on the idea “now that’s over what’s next.”

I give kudos to Williams’ succinct and precise writing. She is careful in her “noun” choices which Emre points out are “either wholly abstract or wholly particular” because these stories are made up not real life - which of course they are but I think flash fiction makes that even more obvious.

This is a book for readers who enjoy perplexing stories that make you think and wonder what you read - in a good sense.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stayed up a little late to finish this collection of 2-3 page "flash fiction." I didn't know what was going on, but I really enjoyed it! The foreword helpfully discussed the author's use of punctuation, so I keyed in on that. Reminded me of a bebop drummer placing accents ("dropping bombs") under a soloist. Random focuses on nature, clothing, sex, and randomly appearing characters helped keep up the interest.

This was an NYRB book club selection, so I imagine a number of books are getting a spike in attention because of that, similar to celebrity book clubs - and some of those are not half bad.

[Justin Dudzinski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly very impressive but just not rlly my thing

The collection as a whole works really well and this certainly made me feel weird and tingly

I already struggle with like, just normal short fiction so these flash fictions really just didn’t compute with my normal reading feelings lol. I just wanna read novels I guess. Sue me!

I am glad I “challenged” myself with this one though - it was good practice

3.4/5

[Landon Shimpa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if I understand what I just read, but I think I liked it. In a single afternoon, I let the small poem-like vignettes flow through the pages and into my brain, but often they didn't conjure much. I think I would quite enjoy going through this book with others, discussing each "story" and the emotions each evokes.

[Gavin Fryer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think at times the style necessitates a sentence structure that ultimately detracts from the understanding of the tale. Each tale has an emotion or two it wants to promote to the reader and I would say they are successful about half the time. These r very focus dependent pieces of writing I think.

[Beau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sentence to sentence, i was amazed by the unique images Williams could conjure with the fewest words. Everything felt sumptuous, tasted fluffy, looked hazy. But as a collection I felt my patience waning. I should have read it over a month or something, two stories a day, but I was looking forward to finishing it.

[Victoria Hall-Palerm · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very weird collection of stories, the longest of which was, I think?, four pages. Her writing style is beautiful, and there isn’t a single word out of place, but the stories end so quickly that I never felt like I understood anything or was invested in the people. Maybe the genre isn’t for me.

[Cara O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very powerful writing style, each word chosen with precision.

[Stan Lanier · Rating 3 out of 5]

I Liked Diane Williams

[Max Schiewe · Rating 3 out of 5]

this lowkey made me really uncomfortable. a spider in the chest

[Charles Kline · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me. Just weird - trying to hard to be clever.

[crista]

as if I, myself, can serve as my own ill-gotten gain.

[Maisie Wrubel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Occasionally moving I suppose, though mostly in a depressing way. I think it's just not for me... maybe because I'm not married and/or divorced

[Barbara T. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strange story fragments. Some interesting thoughts

[Marly Holsman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this like poetry made it make far more sense than reading it like simple fiction. I found myself mentally breaking it into lines and suddenly it was clicking a lot more.

[Jonathan]

She’s the best… review coming soon

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoy flash fiction but the sameness across the stories lost me.

[Lila · Rating 2 out of 5]

These mini short stories are experimental, they do have linking imagery, but it is hard to get a fix on what is going on.

This is the Sept. 2026 selection for NYRB Classics.