{"id":4902,"date":"2012-12-31T19:16:09","date_gmt":"2013-01-01T00:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=4902"},"modified":"2012-12-31T19:16:09","modified_gmt":"2013-01-01T00:16:09","slug":"vicky-swanky-is-a-beauty-by-diane-williamsmcsweeneys-publishing-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/vicky-swanky-is-a-beauty-by-diane-williamsmcsweeneys-publishing-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane WilliamsMcSweeney’s Publishing, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the quotes on the back cover of Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty<\/em> is from Ben Marcus, who calls Diane Williams’s stories the “ideal delivery system” for “the uncanny”: that was the closest thing I could find as a point of entry to these fifty-one short short stories. Or maybe that’s not entirely true: I could see the appeal on the level of words or sentences or phrases, like: “I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted” (13)—that’s from the first piece in the book, “My Defects,” which is quoted in full in Daniel Green’s review of this book<\/a> over at identitytheory.com. I liked the moments of wordplay or verbal slips: in “Between Midnight and 6 AM” (which you can read in full on the McSweeney’s site<\/a>) the narrator says: “To get anywhere in my life at this time!\u2014rather, to get anywhere near my wife at this time!\u2014that can take days” (16). And I liked this, from “Woman in Rose Dress”: “She hadn’t been married long, it was a spring day, and she was uninterested still in her own love story” (35). But I felt uncomfortably adrift in many of the pieces and in the book as a whole: this is a world made strange, a world of dream logic, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I realize this is probably part of the point: in the almost-title story (“Vicky Swanky Was a Beauty”) there’s this: “Cruelly, I’ve seen nothing in the book I am reading—about me. I need to see specifically my life with pointers in the book” (66). Touché?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the quotes on the back cover of Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty is from Ben Marcus, who calls Diane Williams’s stories the “ideal delivery system” for “the uncanny”: that was the closest thing I could find as a point of entry to these fifty-one short short stories. Or maybe that’s not entirely true: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}