Vicky Swanky Is A Beauty is a collection of short shorts or fictions compact enough so as to be spacious if printed on a postcard. Some of the stories may qualify as being flash fiction. Some of the stories may not. All of the stories were written by Diane Williams. Diane Williams writes taut little tales.
Contents:
My Defects
Between Midnight and 6 AM
If Told Correctly It Will Center On Me
Pedestal
Death Bed
Glee
My First Real Home
Broom
On the Job
Mood Which Gripped Me
The Use of Fetishes
Woman In Rose Dress
Weight, Hair, Length
Cockeyed
The Wedding Mask Door Pull
Religious Behavior
Highlights of the Twilight
The Newly Made Supper
Ponytail
Chicken Winchell
The Emporium
Give Them Stuff
The Duck
If You Ever Get Three Or Four Laughing You Weren't Soon To Forget It
Protection, Prevention, Gazing, Gratified Desire
Vicky Swanky Was a Beauty
Carnegie Nail
Stop When The Person Becomes Restless Or Irritable
and other stories
A version of "Religious Behavior" with a longer ending may be found here where it is followed by a story not in this book.
If this book were not a book but rather a musical composition then
its sound would be that of a rhizome, with as many discrete units of song as a noisecore record.
Many of the stories here are wry or grim and may require a second reading in order for the reader to get it. Each of the stories features a different narrator. Some are as short as the shortest paragraph in this review. Some stretch to two or even three pages.
The reviewer picked out this book purely as a result of its cover, which features a painting of a cock by a dead Croat.
On the back of the book there is a number of blurbs on a removable sticker. Deb Olin Unferth, Sam Lipsyte, and Ben Marcus all lauded Diane Williams for the singularity and force of her prose.
This would be a fun book to read to someone who is soaking in a bathtub.
Published by McSweeney's in 2012
118 pages
roughly 13.5 x 20 cm
twenty USD
ISBN 978-1-936365-71-5