‘What am I – I wonder, dear god – now best known for?’ It is a question asked at the end of ‘Gladly!’, one of the American author Diane Williams’s mercurial, light-footed short stories. The narrator in existential crisis has just bumped into a man she ‘once engaged with for years, amid scenes of nearly religious significance’; has found a discarded, brand new pair of ‘canvas All Star high tops’; and witnessed a boy picking up nuts that were ‘meant for squirrels’, and decided that in later life he will be renowned for either ‘gluttony’ or ‘enterprise’.