The Stupefaction — Diane Williams

Praising her ingenious subversions of the conventions of narrative. The New York Times has called Diane Williams "a master spy, a double agent in the house of fiction." In this book she broadens the riotously disruptive program of her earlier collections. piecing together stories out of jagged shards of consciousness to give form to our most complicated longings.

In the title novella, Williams offers her version of paradise: A woman runs off with a man on an enchanted journey across an enchanted landscape to an enchanted house, where their time is spent proving all the pleasures -- eating, drinking, bathing, slumbering, and coupling -- and where fantastic creatures, ravishing objects, and enthralling notions present themselves. But this sensual, blissful tale also becomes, in the female narrator's artful telling, a vehicle of discovery as she passes from state to state eluding our expectations of her.

The novella, Williams's first longer work, is accompanied by forty-nine short pieces, all of them superbly wry and knowing instances of the "sudden fiction" for which she is renowned. The Stupefaction is a stunning illumination of the heart and mind from one of our most innovative and audacious writers.