Some Sexual Success Stories (1992)

A practitioner of a new genre of short-short-story writing called ''sudden fiction,'' Diane Williams conducts mental calisthenics for readers with MTV attention spans. Some Sexual Success Stories, her second surrealistic collection, features a man who invents an ultrapleasure machine, a child whose doctor shoots him in the eye with novocaine, and a woman who keeps her son's last baby tooth glued to the frame of her mirror. Williams tantalizes by withholding or upending information, and her disjunctive yarns can be pointlessly elliptical or immensely satisfying. Though her writing is sometimes mannered, it's usually inventive. B+