It Was Like My Trying To Have a Tender-Hearted Nature - Reviews

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.

-The LA Times

Harnesses Williams's essentially comic sensibility to highly sophisticated, highly satisfying ends....(Her) irony never feels forced or distancing; instead, it allows her to get into some very messy facets of human desire as it gets rammed though American life.

-Publishers Weekly

A pioneer of the genre [short shorts], Diane Williams excels at chiseling narratives out of a few sentences....She is today's premier exponent of the outburst as a literary mode.

-Time Out New York

Williams at her affectionate, disconsolate, indecorous, meta-fictional best.

-Front Porch

...this strange, beguiling slip of a thing from Diane Williams: "It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature," short stories and a novella in which Enrique Woytus, a fur sales manager, falls in love with his neighbor's wife, a predicament rife with heartbreak, absurdity and the peculiar combustion that follows when you mix lust and etiquette, with particular attention to the effects on language.

-Newsday Picks of 2007

You have to slow down to read every word of the forty-one stories and one novella in this collection. Each line manages to be powerfully disorienting and erotically charged, spare and ornate, logical and absurd all at the same time.

-The Story Prize

Reading Diane Williams' warped micro-fictions is like peering through your next-door neighbor's window via a high-powered satellite from outer space: the information that comes back is both skewed and impossible to ignore.

-Boldtype

With the uproarious rudeness of a great mind, Diane Williams writes surprise after surprise, radically reinvented, indecorous and daring and downright funny stories.

-Christine Schutt

Diane Williams's singular, unsettling genius has never been as memorably and heartrendingly evident as in this virtuosic new collection of richly gnomic fictions that are, as always, sublimely vital in every line.

-Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way
and I Looked Alive

Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird.

-Jonathan Franzen

These 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.

-Ben Marcus

In It Was Like My Trying To Have A Tender-Hearted Nature, Diane Williams's short, precise, and emphatic sentences build a strange society whose denizens are not quite familiar to us and not quite comfortable with their own quietly disturbing evolutions. Not a single moment of the prose, here, is what you would expect, and even the ordinary is, in the context created by Diane Williams, no longer ordinary: it is fresh, happy, and peculiar--or is it we who are refreshed, happy, and more peculiar than before after reading her?

-Lydia Davis