Review by Booklist Review
Williams (Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, 2012) is true to her signature form in her newest collection, in which 40 very brief stories strike with precision. Her characters are beleaguered and bewildered by everyday life and all that goes with it: relationships, marriage, aging, and death. In A Mere Flask Poured Out, an accidental spill of wine exposes the tension between parent and child. A Gray Pottery Head portrays a woman whose last moments on earth are preceded by a seemingly mundane arrangement on a mantle. Encompassing interactions both vast and intimate, Williams' tales feature characters who pine for attention while others confront their shifting lives. In The Romantic Life, the narrator is staying with a beloved aunt and is visited by a ghost, Gunther, as well as by Gunther's long-dead dog. In Greed, a family lays claim to a deceased matriarch's jewelry by shouting out their ownership over each pile of gems. Williams' avant-garde stories explore the faulty power of the mind as well as the delusions we embrace to keep moving forward.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Surprising, funny, and evocative, the narratives in Williams's (Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty) newest collection mine small instances for larger meanings. Despite their brevity, these 40 stories exhibit great depth. They explore loneliness, passion, and the "mysteries of daily life." The opening piece, "Beauty, Love and Vanity Itself" quickly establishes the theme and tone. In a digressive, conversational style, an unnamed narrator speaks of her longing for romance. She recalls former lovers and a shared moment with a stranger at a hotel pool that gave her a deeper understanding of her own life. In "Cinch," a homeowner attempts to rid the yard of a gopher. In "Gulls," a woman watches two birds collide in flight. "The Poet" depicts a woman trying to slice bread to feed hungry house pets. The detail and characterization warp the mundane into touching and haunting situations. Each story is a swift bursts of life that encourages repeated readings and opens new interpretations with each encounter. The collection draws its title from "A Little Bottle of Tears," about a married man reflecting on the trials of wedlock. He asks himself if vows can withstand infidelity and suppressed resentments. He answers his own question by repeating the word fine five times, each utterance potentially carrying a different meaning-much like how the moments described in this collection provide different insights when carefully reexamined. Once again, Williams's askew, precise prose demonstrates tremendous compassion and skill. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Centrifugal stories, supershort and superpithy, by avant-gardist Williams. In Williams' stories, a non sequitur has the same weight as an ordinary logical proposition, as if to suggest that either we are very illogical creatures indeed or that no one is really listening to anyone else anyway. So it is that in the opening tale, the narrator, poolside at an Illinois Marriott, implores the lifeguard to notice that swimmers are drowning, to which he replies, "I don't speak Chinese." Is it that the swimmers are Mandarin or that the characters are swimming their way through a dream? In the next story, a woman, clad in a "boiled woolen cloak," dies on a roadway, occasioning the observation on the part of our narrator that "her facial features are remarkably symmetrical, expressing vigor and vulnerability." Even when Williams' characters are engaged in more or less quotidian acts, from washing the dishes to pleasuring a partner, there is an element of jerky oddness to their behavior, as if they were imperfectly programmed robots or ghostsin short, ordinary humans, clumsily self-absorbed. Williams writes precise, elegant, and usually very short sentences, building a story piece by piece and conveying a great deal with just a few details; in the shortest of the pieces, weighing in at just 48 words, a woman on the way to drowningand not a Chinese speaker this timemarvels that the water of the ocean "tasted like a cold, salty variety of her favorite payang congou tea." The most perfect non sequitur? "My fault. Go fuck herself." A little goes a long way: this is a book to sip from, not to devour whole. Charged with meaning, every word carrying more than its weight, this is a series of provocations inviting us to look at the world a little differently from before. Not everyone's cup of tea to be sure, but a pleasing foray in short-short fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
