This book is a collection of very short stories — typically a couple pages, so the term “flash fiction” makes sense.
I think I bought this because I read a piece by Williams in The Paris Review. These very short stories make big impression in a context like that, because they are so dense and open — they’re almost prose poetry. But I have to say that collected like this, they make less of an impression. Many of them are so dense that you have to read them a couple times to understand them properly, and I’m not going to do that with all these. Nobody has time for that! I’ve gotta wash my hair! And stuff! Not involving scrolling Twitter at all! Not at all, I say!
But the book is good stuff.
I’m bemused to see the Goodreads rating:
I have never seen a rating as low as that for an honest-to-goodness actually published book. So let’s see what the naysayers have to say:
Heh heh.
Yeah, OK, I can see how this wouldn’t work as an audiobook.
Geezes! These people really don’t like the book.
I guess we all have our own references.
Oh no! Not betrayed by the good cover! She’s probably talking about this cover, though:
I think my edition is British…
Anyway, it’s amusing to see that avant garde books still have the power to épater les bourgeois, so to speak.
I Hear You’re Rich (2023) by Diane Williams (buy new, buy used, 2.6 on Goodreads)