Excitability collects the best of Diane Williams's bold, often hilarious, stories of love, sex, child-rearing, death, and space aliens--stories that are (in the words of Bradford Morrow) "wry, sensuous, spiritual, wise, raunchy, familial...alive to the contradictory nuances which define our lives."

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").