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

[Dave Marsland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did I like I Liked Rex? yes I did. It came my way a part of an NYRB subscription and I'd never heard of the author before. The ultra short stories are witty, strange and beautiful. They are also very clever. Read in a single, perfect day.

[Bleah · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Patrick]

Not giving stars because I really am not sure what to rate this. It’s kind of like Adler’s Speedboat but much more fast-paced, and it’s a bunch of very short stories with no connected characters. I also found parts of Speedboat to be more humorous. I don’t call them micro-stories because there’s many times where the stories sort of feel like they don’t even really conclude; they feel like they somewhat abruptly end at times; they sometimes feel like there’s supposed to be some meaning in them but I myself haven’t really decided on what the meaning would be if there is any meaning. So I can’t really decide. Maybe a 3.8? I don’t know.

[Breann Hunt · Rating 1 out of 5]

absolutely nothing here. would honestly rather read AI generated work emails than this book.

[Gayle · Rating 4 out of 5]

We have a rescue teacup chihuahua called Rex. Mini, but mighty, just like these stories.

I’m a lover of all the forms that short stories can take, and this is another, shorter short story collection - a book of moments. Unsatisfyingly open ended is one way you could look at this collection of micro fictions. Strange, but much beauty and imagery is conjured in these words. If you are looking for a beginning, middle and end you will definitely miss it.

I felt the need to sit with each story, but I was driven like a motor to move on to the next. I will absolutely read it again.

Read like poetry, maybe it would be more accessible - I’m quite shocked at the low ratings here as it’s witty and clever - a gem that doesn’t need complete understanding - it’s all just human emotion and human connection in beautiful mini micro prose.

[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.

[Jonathan Succo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry, but make it prose (poetry is existence at the zenith of the bell curve. Am I too dumb or too not-so-dumb?)

[Zoe Lask · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Reisse Myy · Rating 1 out of 5]

The slippery use of verb tense in this collection ensured that my relationship to its brevity only ever bordered on the hypothetical. Flippant, inelegant, and chirpy, with a few standout stories drowned out by the fetishistic over-complication of the rest… “that sort of thing.”

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Uhhhhhhh. Most of my thoughts are leaning towards skepticism, but I have to give points for novelty.

If I’m being honest with myself, the fact that Diane Williams is an 80-year-old woman is a major reason I’m extending enough grace to reread stories and space this out, that I know I wouldn’t be giving to an Instagram phenom of my age.

I definitely like this on a sentence level, there are some fantastic lines and images here. The conundrum is how little is around and between those sentences. If all fiction is a trick to make our minds project full lives and people into collections of scenes and descriptions, this is the far end of how much you can strain the entire project of fiction. Some stories have an interesting way of evoking a longer short story’s worth of emotion... but at the same time, we’re very good at finding faces in drywall texture also. It’s interesting as an experiment in this way, but the fact that all this inspired was this heady meta analysis makes me think something’s not working here.

About a third-way through this I had the cruelly dismissive thought that, accounting for names and pronouns, you could shuffle the paragraphs between all the sentence-diorama-type stories to little difference. I don’t know if that’s literally true, but once I thought it, it was a bug that I couldn’t shake as I finished the collection.

She does have a playfulness I like: I kind of love some of her mic drop non-sequitur final lines (it’s kind of awesome to just drop a “Sexually I have my feelings.” or “I am devastating.” and call it there). “I Did Trip Over a Very Small Boy” is a very good title. I laughed aloud a couple times (my fav was “a snake—a serpent I hate”). I like that nearly all the dialogue is inconsequential mid-conversation fragments (an aspect that makes some stories feel like a hypnagogic audio hallucination of someone chattering nothing in correct sentence cadence).

One tic that annoyed me however is the constant fourth wall breaking, hedging, and archetypal inspecificities. You’re already barely writing anything…you tell me.

Overall I can’t say I buy it but I am intrigued. It added something to the range of literature. Worth forming an opinion on.

[Fergus]

I suppose being published in NYRB late into your very experimental career bears the unwanted side effect of goodreads NYRB slopreaders complaining that it 'makes no sense.' I'm not really sure what these people want to read, a car manual? Perhaps worse is the cottage industry of the remaining self serious lit scene twitter dilettantes, Greg Gerke et. al. who for some reason have begun to claim Williams has gone downhill in recent years (and yet, in the same instance of critiquing the great comic writer of our times, appear incapable of ever, even once, making or understanding a joke...) It speaks volumes of her quality that Christian Lorentzen was the only one to come out in her defense amidst the charlatans... To them all I say, go back to reading car manuals or jacking off to Arno Schmidt! WILLIAMS is the American writer PAR EXCELLENCE, and has lost NO LUSTRE.

[Christopher Walthorne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all flash fiction, these stories are all unsatisfying in the end, but Williams is clearly a writer with a gift. Top Tip: don’t try to understand these stories; just enjoy the mystery and beauty of her words.

[Jasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

i mean it’s flashfiction from the 80 year old founder of a literary magazine, with all the positive and negative connotations of that. it’s exactly what it says on the tin.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

tl;dr this oddly tender collection of flash-stories focuses in large part on the aftermath of human connection, as well as attempts at self-love -- in the quietude, you can hear diane williams softly laughing

"I want an outlook on life, a plan for my life. I want to feel like an excited dog." (p. 6, "Betty")

I had the great honor of hearing Williams give a reading of stories from I Liked Rex at a local bookstore. She was soft spoken and a little shy to start, but once she began reading, the choppy vignettes of everyday domesticity seemed to animate in the room. It was an odd, thrilling sorcery, and a testament to the intention placed into every word, piece of punctuation, and sequence of sentences that coalesce into some earnest "oh-shucks!" truth about the pursuit of happiness.

It's also a signal of how slowly you must approach Williams's fiction. Though the word count is low, the effort required to comprehend these stories is what makes these stories feel full length. Willams excises any clear throughline that would transition one sentence to another. It's collagist, but the fun comes in filling in the blanks. Hell -- sometimes it's even comprehending the first sentence of a story. The collection starts with this sentence:

I walked past, not young, old elm trees that should have dignity. (p. 5, "Betty")

Wait, what? There's a jerky rhythm to this sentence, demarcated by oddly placed commas and a conspicuously italicized word. "Not young" almost seemed to me to be modifying "I", as in, the narrator wasn't young; but then it also seems like "not young" could be the narrator trying to think in real time what the elm trees looked like. Then, to end the sentence, the narrator says they should have dignity, as if it's just widely accepted that yeah of course an elm tree should have that -- but what does an undignified elm tree look like? I'm generally arboreally challenged, so I looked up what elm trees look like, and I'm imagining "undignified" to maybe mean that they're shriveled or bare, as in winter.

Williams's syntax is genuinely strange and I'd even hazard to say inventive. Within the bounds of the English language, Williams is able to bend and manipulate phrases and sentences in ways that I've truly not seen from other writers. The opening sentence demands this level of scrutiny -- its awkwardness forces the reader to stop and look at the trees.

The primary focus of I Liked Rex is the aftermath of human connection, some successful, some failed; as the past tense of the collection's title might suggest, these stories seem to revel in the wreckage of fallen-apart relationships, a friend-date that never happened, and in several cases, sex. The short length of these stories speak to the ephemeral nature of the present moment; after connection is done, what else is there to do but think or reflect upon it?

How did this woman meet Jimmy? His dog approached and she petted his dog in, say, Paris.
Then their romance — and how they loved it!
Such times can be piled high and arranged like flavored ice cream in a fancy dish, and these were.
There followed a marriage and decisive difficulties. Still, she thinks on some occasions, she is safe. (p. 80, "Someone Else's Story")

Remarkably, in these very short stories, Williams is able to evoke the passage of time, at times, the progression of a human relationship from start to finish (as in the excerpt above). It's that blend of chopped-up, yet hyperspecific details that give these tales a lived-in quality. Then, the good parts of a relationship are likened to singularly joyous human experiences -- lots of ice cream, or a man's private parts like "some cheery dessert".

In the act of reflecting on human connection, Williams occasionally turns the lens, cheekily, on herself, as an anxious storyteller/editor. One story literally devolves into this. After writing so many stories of domestic slices of life, Williams is breaking the fourth wall, referring to herself by name (a story entitled "Diane!"), or offering meta commentary on whose side of a relationship she's on.

At the reading that I attended, Williams declared her favorite story if I Liked Rex to be "Pleasure of the Day", saying "It is the most myself in this collection". In it, a narrator walks into her favorite cafe, and enjoys a drink and a wonderfully delicious, "swollen" pastry, only to realize, at the end, that the world looks "a lot shittier" when such a pleasure is done and overwith. But throughout, there seems to be some sort of catastrophe imminent -- the first sentence starts "Before things fell apart..."; and later, a song playing in the background reminds her of her younger self "gulp-weeping". It's a delightfully earnest portrayal of a key piece of late-capitalist Americana: treat culture.

To cheer us both up, I drove us westward from the donut shop—to get us to this different district, where we could look down from the car, from the big drooping hill onto a pretty plain—topped by a wide stripe of light—a celestial streak.
It was sad that That Nothing Be Lost Thrift was shuttered. (p. 117, "Fear, Caution, Disgust")

The penultimate story tells of a road trip a couple is taking, seemingly to just feel something, wither with each other or life in general. They partake in pleasures (an elided donut shop trip, a haircut, another diner, a picturesque suspension bridge), but the doomy sense of these pursuits not solving the problem at hand (one, of course, not disclosed to us) cast a pall on the beauty described throughout. But the finale story, "The Place for Love in Human Life" (hint: it's you!) is one of the most strikingly heartfelt displays of self-love put to paper. The story itself feels like it breaks into a smile. Diane Williams closed the live reading event with that story; the door to the tiny bookstore was propped open so the laughs of children just next door -- at an ice cream shop, because of course! -- seemed like a tiny Greek chorus filling the room with the pure joy of self-acceptance.

[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.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

If considered as poetry, these micro short stories shine. Flash fiction seems too trendy to take seriously, and under that banner they underwhelm. If I read these again in a few years it would be a new experience, which is good but also alerts you to the fact that in the end they are not that memorable.

[william · Rating 2 out of 5]

unclear if i’ve lost an abstract paradise or more simply lost a few hours of my time reading these minuscule stories

[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.

[Kevin · Rating 1 out of 5]

🥱

[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.    

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

This being my fourth book by Williams, I knew what I was gonna get. And what I got was another fabulous collection of playful, mischievous, abstract, mysterious stories by one of the most idiosyncratic writers I know.

She was described somewhere as “the godmother of flash fiction”, and, as can happen—unfortunately—the description stuck. I never liked it—the term flash fiction—and I don’t use it. And it seems Merve Emre, who wrote the introduction, doesn’t either: “…that term has no discernible meaning, no purchase on either the aesthetic features of these stories or the experience of reading them.”

How to give a sense of the experience of reading them? I’m not going to attempt it. Thank God once again for Merve Emre, who explains it simply enough—and keep in mind these stories are very short: “Their humor hinges on the sharp sense of disproportion between the stories’ parts and their whole. The details they lavish their attentions on appear too specific, too extravagant, and too dazzling for the narrative that encloses them, which, by comparison, appears undeveloped in the conventional terms of character and plot.”

What really is going on with the characters/narrators? What is discernible is that the stories live in the domestic sphere, in ordinary life, and are concerned with marriage and sex, women’s interior lives and their moments of epiphany, joy, pain, surprise, and bewilderment. Or is the bewilderment mine? The stories are tangled and are meant to be. While open to interpretation, they’re not solvable.

The sentences are constantly tilting you off balance. And that’s a big source of their pleasure. Go with it.

[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.

[Karsten]

I would encourage everyone to read this book and I did enjoy it. It's not fair to give this book a star rating because its form is very different from any other book I have read. Each story feels like a painting-- what you see is what you get and it's up to you to expand upon that in your mind. There's no excuse for any author to not be able to craft a complete, coherent narrative if Williams can do it in three or fewer pages. The prose is good and flows quite nicely, but the stories are a bit samey, so it's likely more enjoyable to spread out your reading and limit yourself to one or two stories a day. A lot of the stories were almost exactly the same length, which may be an intentional style choice, and it made the rhythm of the stories feel a bit repetitive. Again, this may only be an issue because I read the entire book straight through.

[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.

[mark foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I do understand the low review scores, I think this book was mis-marketed as "short stories" rather than "narrative prose poetry," I still feel that I got my joy's worth. Now, if I'd paid $23 at the cash for it I'd feel differently but I got it through the NYRB book club which is an annual payment which means other than the one day of the year when my chequing account takes a swift right hook, these books are free-99! Anyways, Williams is a font of play, a sly-eyed puppy who does not fear any flag to fly. Good for her!!

[Paris · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

I usually have a hard time getting into short story collections because I prefer more time to sit with the characters and their stories. Needless to say, I had an even harder time getting into this collection of "flash fiction" because they are even shorter--most only 2-3 pages--and read more like poetry. A lot of little moments of human emotion and connections with a hint of meta-fiction. Short and sweet, but not for me.

Favorite stories:
Dead Nettle, Lilyleek, and Toothwort
Pleasure of the Day
The Greatest Experience
A Perfect Fit
I Wish for That Way of Life

[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

[TJ]

One of the pull quotes on the back says that not a moment of the prose is what one would expect when reading, and there is not better way to describe what reading this book is like. Each story/chapter is interesting in own right, and then from there each sentence and word choice is interesting and surprising. Taking them together the cumulative effect of the three dozen stories/chapters is quite dreamy.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to read this collection, which shows an experimental approach to flash fiction. I noticed a theme of women and food in a number of the short stories and the final tale in the collection appeared to be a rare example of a female narrator enjoying a meal and feeling satisfied with herself. A number of stories were enigmatic and didn't appeal to me but I thought "Even Before You Speak" spoke volumes in a very short story.