Some Sexual Success Stories, Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose To Appear by Diane Williams

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Publishers Weekly

It is tempting to invoke Gertrude Stein when discussing this collection of 68 one- or two-page stories by the author of This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate. (Some of her tales are not much longer than her titles.) Williams, co-editor of StoryQuarterly , pens sudden fictions that are as much momentary rants, riffs and rampages as they are stories in the conventional sense. With titles like ``Pussy,'' ``Really, Really, Really,'' ``Icky,'' ``This One's About (------),'' and ``The Fullness of Life Is from Something,'' the stories range from poetic to startling to merely outrageous. ``There was no Weinberg. The server barging into all that with his tray of only a few nuggets on a doily was peevish with his back arched, with his chin up,'' is the characteristically enigmatic beginning of ``Crush.'' Williams is deft with a kind of verbal juggling that prompts one to read aloud, because even when her text seems nonsensical, it has the rhythms of meaningful discourse. But fundamentally it's shallow, and most rare readers will soon tire of its tricky format. (Jan.)