‘The writer who saved my life — or my soul.’ Merve Emre, The New Yorker ‘A true living hero of the American avant-garde.’ Jonathan Franzen ‘One of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt.’ Lydia Davis A new collection of stories from the ‘godmother of flash fiction’ (The Paris Review). In Williams’ stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life. In perfectly honed sentences, with a sly and occasionally wild wit, Williams shows us how any moment of any day can open onto disappointment, pleasure, and possibility.

Consisting of a series of essays written by storytellers who work in the classroom, as well as teachers who use storytelling in the classroom, this title addresses specific curriculum areas, and includes practical, easily replicable lesson plans. Also included is a review and explanation of the current research on the value of storytelling in the classroom in teaching the whole brain using the multiple intelligences and the integration of thinking in the left and right brain. It makes valid connections to educational standards in curriculum areas. Topics addressed are from the dual viewpoints of storytellers and educators. The Storytelling Classroom is an inspiring, practical and immediately applicable collection of preK through eighth grade lesson plans by and for teachers and media specialists who use storytelling in the classroom and storytellers who work in the classroom. Each lesson plan is linked to National Standards in Language Arts Social Studies, Math or Science and accompanied by an essay which provides a glimpse of the alchemy that occurs when students, teachers and story are brought together: student engagement, classrooms that are alive with thinking students, LEARNING!

Fiction. "Williams's miniatures cast long shadows, while offering unexpected meanings to the light which edges them" (Bradford Morrow). In these "miniatures, " Williams takes the choicest bits of description, tense, and poetic language, and crafts of them a dense and multifaceted languages: "Thank goodness I am deeply sincere, so I stopped laughing. He had dragged me along to this refined filth of a hotel, which aroused my truest false feeling. On the way to the hotel, he was staggering and I was. If my wish is at last coming true, he is going to spring on me something that will make me fell as helpless as a human being" ("Speech").

Famous for her works of "flash fiction" which capture life, love, and contradiction in a single page, Diane Williams continues to forge her own innovative tradition in this new collection. Including over three dozen short stories along with three novellas, Romancer Erector is her boldest collection to date. Here she once again astonishes us with her distinctive voice, detached yet fiercely intimate. As one critic writes: "the effect is original, as if a strange little memory has insinuated itself into the reader's own memory, to remain there...incapable of assimilation." Like intricately wrapped gifts, these tales deliver the hidden, the haunted, the charms, the bell, the mansions inside of the human heart.