How High? That High

Williams delivers visionary insights into what it means to be human in stories as short as one or two pages. Her startling sentences often function like wake-up trumpet blasts, and her latest collection of ultra-short masterworks is a container for the elliptical, the magisterial, the voluptuous, and the profane. Set in cafes and houses, taxicabs and gardens, the stories of Diane Williams, ''the godmother of flash fiction'' (The Paris Review), deliver moments of extraordinary beauty and wisdom.