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Excitability
"Excitability" collects the best of Diane Williams' bold, often hilarious stories of love, sex, death, and the family.
329 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1998
About the author
Diane Williams
104 books156 followersDiane 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."
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."
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
January 24, 2015
The mighty reading list dictates and, having dictated, moves on...
So a nice little lit short fiction comp to cleanse the palate after tons of genre material. This officially would be a 2.5 or even 2.75 if such things could be, but gets the 2 over the 3 because, yeah, I didn't finish it and that was at least partly by choice - granted, I had run out the Inter-library loan clock and now owe something like $11 in fines for keeping it for so long but, even then, I would have toughed it out if I'd felt it was likely to be ultimately rewarding.
Which is not say or even imply this is a bad book or that Williams is a bad writer - not at all. I could imagine that for some her style might even be an eye opening or (if writers) style-changing event.
Cause here's the thing - Williams writes these super-short concentrated pieces - you can't even call them stories because by most standards they're not. It's lit flash (probably called micro-fiction at the time) and looking at lit versions of the form (much as I did when reading Short Shorts) helps me grapple with my various problems and questions about the genre version of the form.
Because Lit has it easier in this case - the freedom to do almost anything, in any way, with any attack, towards any point, means that expectations are slightly different for these pieces than they would be for genre flash. Everything is up for grabs, essentially.
So what you get here is an endless stream of 1,2,3 or even 1/2 page pieces. Disjointed, skeletal narratives that occasionally sketch the bare expectations of story. More often (not surprisingly), character sketches hinged on the smallest of events (which sometimes makes the title of great importance - and sometimes, not at all). Tart vignettes illuminating psyches.
I could certainly see how this could be enjoyable or revelatory for a reader, especially those encountering the "finished with narrative/plot is the enemy" movement for the first time. And I'm not even saying that reader can't be me - there are some great pieces here, which I'll discuss in a moment - this collection arrived like a breath of fresh air after being smothered in genre and heavy narrative fiction for a while (it's a key component of both of my jobs!), reminding me yet again of the wide variety of ways there are to write fiction. Certainly, aspiring flash writers should check out Williams' stuff.
On the other hand, "collection" is the important point. I left this book, half unread, feeling like I'd already had way more of Williams than I wanted (for all I know, there may have been some gems in that second half). Partly (as I said before) this was just a function of circumstance (clock was ticking) but, more so, these pieces strike me as works that would be most effective when read singularly, in magazines or at least at a slow pace - little baubles to be savored (when they work) or discarded (when they don't), shining more in relation to other works around them than heaped up together as here.
And that's kind of the way it is with experiments in form - the best works here weave a delicate web of associations with image and dialogue, evoking some off-kilter mood or oddly conflicted idea. Gnomic cameos crafted of words, they feel like a segment of time illuminated by a flash-bulb of language - meaning and depth hinted at but just fading into the dark as the intended length of the piece encroaches and... that's all you get. So you go back and study what's in the word photo, what was actually said and how.... Unlike a lot of experimental writing Williams work is generally accessible (if frustrating) and reminded me a bit of David Lynch, not in the brooding creepiness sense but in the sense that the work has meaning, the meaning is possibly inscrutable and that inscrutability doesn't really matter.
The worst here (maybe "most unsuccessful") are so vague as to seem random, with no apparent hook enticing one to puzzle them out, coming off instead like some slapdashed-off musing, recording a "shocking" thought or thin concept. Even those failures can sometimes be illuminating in a way, as Williams really does have a distinctly odd and considered language construction sense, a writer's toolbox full of self-cancelling or repetitive phrases, deliberately unbalanced contrasts and flow-disrupting choices so when the magic doesn't gel, you find yourself examining the construction a bit more. But in the end, these weaker pieces feel like experiments in conjuring the *implication* of meaning through language, without there actually being any. Which I guess is somebody's bag, but not mine unless I'm reading DADA.
So much for form, what of content? Well, as I said, it's mostly vague since plot or narrative is barely the point but there are recurrent themes. Sex, relationships, money, beauty, social station, the wealthy (or at least well-off), children, social gatherings, meals, public spaces, wedding rings and ordering systems. Many of the barely glimpsed characters strike me as painfully self-aware, self-involved, insecure and smart but over-thinking types who inhabit worlds of vague and unformed (but strongly held) concerns - language and dialogue forcing their statements to seem to have more weight (or be more absolute) than they possibly intend. There are a lot of (internally) ugly and shallow people here and the author can sometimes seem brave for courageously sketching them honestly, but at other times there seems nothing valorous about asking us to contemplate such vacuity (at times once can feel that persistent worry about the incipient, growing sociopathology of the leisured classes leaking through - people who care about nothing very much except caring about their interior lives A LOT!). Williams isn't judging - doesn't really even have space to judge - just recording and sketching.
In truth, I liked the experiment with form/style more than the content (at times the content seemed almost aggressively negligible). Occasionally, there's a fun piece ("Eero", which another reviewer complained about, cracked me up with its repeated letters attempting to replicate the effect of two people saying the same thing simultaneously). It occurs to me that hearing Williams read some of these pieces might prove illuminating, if nothing else giving an example of what words she choices to stress.
But, as I said, they all felt like they were piling up after a while.
"Here's Another Ending" had a nice fable-like feeling and "Gods Of The Earth At Home" has some sharp class observation. "All American" and "To Die" are, respectively, excellent examples of that sociopathic observation or ugly shallowness. "Ultimate Object" and "Again" were extremely creepy and "Egg" uses the idea of a killer and victim in an interesting way - but "The Case Of The Cold Murderer" had me intrigued until the non-sequitur ending.
It might make for an interesting and divisive episode of Pseudopod (hearkening back to the post-modernism experimentation of our Christine Brooke-Rose episode) if I were to get the rights to the creepy pieces...
So a nice little lit short fiction comp to cleanse the palate after tons of genre material. This officially would be a 2.5 or even 2.75 if such things could be, but gets the 2 over the 3 because, yeah, I didn't finish it and that was at least partly by choice - granted, I had run out the Inter-library loan clock and now owe something like $11 in fines for keeping it for so long but, even then, I would have toughed it out if I'd felt it was likely to be ultimately rewarding.
Which is not say or even imply this is a bad book or that Williams is a bad writer - not at all. I could imagine that for some her style might even be an eye opening or (if writers) style-changing event.
Cause here's the thing - Williams writes these super-short concentrated pieces - you can't even call them stories because by most standards they're not. It's lit flash (probably called micro-fiction at the time) and looking at lit versions of the form (much as I did when reading Short Shorts) helps me grapple with my various problems and questions about the genre version of the form.
Because Lit has it easier in this case - the freedom to do almost anything, in any way, with any attack, towards any point, means that expectations are slightly different for these pieces than they would be for genre flash. Everything is up for grabs, essentially.
So what you get here is an endless stream of 1,2,3 or even 1/2 page pieces. Disjointed, skeletal narratives that occasionally sketch the bare expectations of story. More often (not surprisingly), character sketches hinged on the smallest of events (which sometimes makes the title of great importance - and sometimes, not at all). Tart vignettes illuminating psyches.
I could certainly see how this could be enjoyable or revelatory for a reader, especially those encountering the "finished with narrative/plot is the enemy" movement for the first time. And I'm not even saying that reader can't be me - there are some great pieces here, which I'll discuss in a moment - this collection arrived like a breath of fresh air after being smothered in genre and heavy narrative fiction for a while (it's a key component of both of my jobs!), reminding me yet again of the wide variety of ways there are to write fiction. Certainly, aspiring flash writers should check out Williams' stuff.
On the other hand, "collection" is the important point. I left this book, half unread, feeling like I'd already had way more of Williams than I wanted (for all I know, there may have been some gems in that second half). Partly (as I said before) this was just a function of circumstance (clock was ticking) but, more so, these pieces strike me as works that would be most effective when read singularly, in magazines or at least at a slow pace - little baubles to be savored (when they work) or discarded (when they don't), shining more in relation to other works around them than heaped up together as here.
And that's kind of the way it is with experiments in form - the best works here weave a delicate web of associations with image and dialogue, evoking some off-kilter mood or oddly conflicted idea. Gnomic cameos crafted of words, they feel like a segment of time illuminated by a flash-bulb of language - meaning and depth hinted at but just fading into the dark as the intended length of the piece encroaches and... that's all you get. So you go back and study what's in the word photo, what was actually said and how.... Unlike a lot of experimental writing Williams work is generally accessible (if frustrating) and reminded me a bit of David Lynch, not in the brooding creepiness sense but in the sense that the work has meaning, the meaning is possibly inscrutable and that inscrutability doesn't really matter.
The worst here (maybe "most unsuccessful") are so vague as to seem random, with no apparent hook enticing one to puzzle them out, coming off instead like some slapdashed-off musing, recording a "shocking" thought or thin concept. Even those failures can sometimes be illuminating in a way, as Williams really does have a distinctly odd and considered language construction sense, a writer's toolbox full of self-cancelling or repetitive phrases, deliberately unbalanced contrasts and flow-disrupting choices so when the magic doesn't gel, you find yourself examining the construction a bit more. But in the end, these weaker pieces feel like experiments in conjuring the *implication* of meaning through language, without there actually being any. Which I guess is somebody's bag, but not mine unless I'm reading DADA.
So much for form, what of content? Well, as I said, it's mostly vague since plot or narrative is barely the point but there are recurrent themes. Sex, relationships, money, beauty, social station, the wealthy (or at least well-off), children, social gatherings, meals, public spaces, wedding rings and ordering systems. Many of the barely glimpsed characters strike me as painfully self-aware, self-involved, insecure and smart but over-thinking types who inhabit worlds of vague and unformed (but strongly held) concerns - language and dialogue forcing their statements to seem to have more weight (or be more absolute) than they possibly intend. There are a lot of (internally) ugly and shallow people here and the author can sometimes seem brave for courageously sketching them honestly, but at other times there seems nothing valorous about asking us to contemplate such vacuity (at times once can feel that persistent worry about the incipient, growing sociopathology of the leisured classes leaking through - people who care about nothing very much except caring about their interior lives A LOT!). Williams isn't judging - doesn't really even have space to judge - just recording and sketching.
In truth, I liked the experiment with form/style more than the content (at times the content seemed almost aggressively negligible). Occasionally, there's a fun piece ("Eero", which another reviewer complained about, cracked me up with its repeated letters attempting to replicate the effect of two people saying the same thing simultaneously). It occurs to me that hearing Williams read some of these pieces might prove illuminating, if nothing else giving an example of what words she choices to stress.
But, as I said, they all felt like they were piling up after a while.
"Here's Another Ending" had a nice fable-like feeling and "Gods Of The Earth At Home" has some sharp class observation. "All American" and "To Die" are, respectively, excellent examples of that sociopathic observation or ugly shallowness. "Ultimate Object" and "Again" were extremely creepy and "Egg" uses the idea of a killer and victim in an interesting way - but "The Case Of The Cold Murderer" had me intrigued until the non-sequitur ending.
It might make for an interesting and divisive episode of Pseudopod (hearkening back to the post-modernism experimentation of our Christine Brooke-Rose episode) if I were to get the rights to the creepy pieces...
April 7, 2008
I've given it 5 stars because I'm completely bowled over by this woman's writing. Mind you I only understand about three quarters of it, I think. The disturbing sexuality, the breezy vignettes, the dark goings on... I'm hooked. Some of the writing is deliberately misleading, weird weird stuff and maybe not every one will go for it. Me - give me more!
July 11, 2007
Diane is one of my heroes. Her short and mysterious stories always inspire me, even when I'm not exactly sure what the heck is going on. I like her better than Lydia Davis, another fine minimalist author.
April 20, 2019
Hilarious, honest, weird, raunchy, and perfectly sculpted micros. So good!
August 9, 2019
Williams makes the ordinary sublime and Gothic with her sprawling syntax and opaque prose. But you never leave a piece feeling too confused. Maybe a little horny.
June 6, 2018
20-30 years on these short pieces seem anachronistic, a sad commentary perhaps on the state of lit fiction in the mid-80s to mid-90s. Some gems, of course, after much tough mining.
March 19, 2017
Diane Williams write very short stories. Mostly they are under two pages. Many of them are under a page. They fly by. They are the barest of stories. Really, they are the hook of the story, the snapshot of the psyche, but by this I don't mean that they are lacking: they aren't, they just don't need to be any more than that. What we get here is the character, the person and the circumstances in such an incredibly powerful way that I was often bowled over.
Here is the only problem with this book: it was my first foray into Williams, and it is collected from a bunch of her books. The result is that sometimes you could see the jump from one book to another, and it felt muddled as a result, where you aren't getting the full sweep of a collection, but a partially erratic selection. It grated a bit, even though the writing was phenominal, and with this kind of writing, you don't need that kind of distraction. I'm going to go back to her actual collections now, and I would recommend to others that they start there.
Here is the only problem with this book: it was my first foray into Williams, and it is collected from a bunch of her books. The result is that sometimes you could see the jump from one book to another, and it felt muddled as a result, where you aren't getting the full sweep of a collection, but a partially erratic selection. It grated a bit, even though the writing was phenominal, and with this kind of writing, you don't need that kind of distraction. I'm going to go back to her actual collections now, and I would recommend to others that they start there.
December 18, 2013
I am obviously in the minority on this one but I really did not like this book at all. There were only 2 stories (The Kind You Know Forever and Here's Another Ending) out of over 100 that I somewhat enjoyed and by that I mean that were coherent enough to actually form a story or make any kind of sense whatsoever. One story, Eero, actually featured extra letters in every single word on purpose: "Att ourr housse, itt's ggoing onn" - what is the purpose of that besides extreme annoyance? I really am shocked that this is so highly rated...I guess I just don't get it - whatever "it" may be.
December 14, 2007
i've only read selections from this, but the stuff i've read is pretty fab. very dark short-shorts, many of which explore sex, adultery, violence, jealousy, etc. a few of these stories i've read a dozen times and still cannot trace how she gets from one place to another; amazing what she can do in 300 words or less.
Read
January 30, 2011these stories make me feel excited! sometimes a little nervous, sometimes exhilarated. when i read them on the train i was afraid that people might be reading over my shoulder, but i also hoped that they were.
December 5, 2017
Strange, dark, funny, and impressively economical...
February 21, 2022
Oh jeez, this book really slowed me down, I didn’t read for three days because it seemed such a chore. A dude from tinder(haha) recommended this to me ages ago and I only just decided to read it. I think it has more to do with me than with the writing because I didn’t have a problem with it I think I even liked it, it just felt impossible to read… to the point where every 10 pages became an exercise in patience. I don’t think I would have made it past 100 pages if it wasn’t a rec. maybe I will try again in 5 years lol.
January 18, 2020
Made it about halfway through before throwing in the towel. The writing is not bad, but the form was awful... it was very jarring and difficult to read and process a series of unrelated vignettes presented across only 2-3 pages each.
March 20, 2019
A defiantly mediocre Lydia Davis / Lucia Berlin manque.
Read
October 27, 2025What
May 3, 2025
Far too stylistically vague and the invocation of sexual taboos comes across very tame, never coming close to challenging instrumental puritan protestant ideas of sexuality in the way it seems like she wanted to. there are a handful of great stories (turning, once i had to do what i had to do) but they're too far between
June 9, 2007
This one opened my mind to the aesthetics of short fiction. I didn't feel that every piece was successful, but I admire the risks that Williams takes. I also get a perverse sense of satisfaction from her sick sense of humor.
February 23, 2009
sharp mini stories in snack form.
April 7, 2009
What I consider a hot piece of literay eroticism. Maybe the hottest since the Marquis.
August 20, 2009
I just think her sentences are amazing and her own and she has a style, her own, and that's the mark of the real thing. Fascinating read.
September 10, 2013
absurd and raw and hilarious and weird and bodies and sex and language and totally and completely disarming.
March 25, 2014
Brilliant. Dirty, confusing, and smart.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews