Maggie Doherty in The New Republic said, "Diane Williams seeks to stun, in something near the literal sense of the word .
There are no first sentences full of orienting details, no dramatic dialogue, no neat epiphanies in a story's final lines.
The Boston Globe said "Vicky Swanky' is Williams at her best, shaking us awake again to the persistent strangeness of human life."
Vanity Fair wrote "The shorts in Diane Williams' Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty emit an unsettling brilliance, becoming, on repeated readings, even stranger and more revelatory."
Ben Marcus says of this work: "The uncanny has met its ideal delivery system: the stories of Diane Williams."
Torbjorn Elensky comments in Ord & Bild, Number 4: 2012 that "Anyone who writes or who is interested in prose as an art form should spend some time with her work.
The only thing you risk is that much of the supposedly poetic prose being published these days will seem flat after a few rounds with Diane Williams.
[3] Her books have been reviewed in many publications, including the New York Times Book Review ("An operation worthy of a master spy, a double agent in the house of fiction")[4] and The Los Angeles Times ("One of America's most exciting violators of habit is [Diane] Williams…the extremity that Williams depicts and the extremity of the depiction evoke something akin to the pity and fear that the great writers of antiquity considered central to literature.
"[2] Ben Marcus suggested that her "outrageous and ferociously strange stories test the limits of behavior, of manners, of language, and mark Diane Williams as a startlingly original writer worthy of our closest attention.
In January 2016, Rachel Syme of The New York Times described it as "a beautiful annual that remains staunchly avant-garde in its commitment to work that is oblique, enigmatic and impossible to ignore.
Alison Kelly wrote, [T]he best stories in NOON are, indeed, stunning, in the sense that they leave one conscious of powerful meanings not yet fully absorbed.