“One of America’s most exciting violators of habit.” —Los Angeles Times

“Fiction ought to lead us to those precipices where language fails and silence begins. You would be well advised, with a master like Williams, to take the plunge.” —The New York Times

Diane Williams is one of the great masters of the American short story: her tiny, coruscating tales are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature. I Liked Rex explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive. Williams’s genius lies as much in what is left unspoken as in what is laid out on the page; behind images of startling beauty and strangeness, entire chamber dramas of the heart unfold, and the pleasure of these sphinxlike tales comes from their unremitting mystery, which is the same mystery fundamental to life and to love. A collection of rare originality and daring, I Liked Rex is a complete and utter delight.

Diane Williams is the author of several collections of short fiction and the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. An omnibus of her work, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, was published in 2018. I Liked Rex is her twelfth book of fiction. The NOON archive, as well as Williams’s personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library. She lives in New York City.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America and The Ferrante Letters. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.