“True to her reputation, these are refined stories possessing many hallmarks of [Diane Williams's] past work: sharp dialogue fraught with tension, highly agile shifts in perspective, acerbic humour, and the ability to surprise without reducing the form too often to a gimmick or a stunt.”

— The National on Vicky Swanky is a Beauty

Vicky Swanky is a Beauty

ISBN: 9781938073038


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Vicky Swanky is a Beauty


by Diane Williams


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.