Adorei! É o meu tipo de livro."We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring."

I first learned about Lydia Davis from Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm radio show (podcasts available online here: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw, changed my life here in lonely Japan with no books to read and no one to talk to about books), and he said that she ought to be read at the rate she appears in the little mags, one short piece per every few weeks, and I agree. This is a writer to be savoured. That hasn't stopped me from gorging myself on her writing for the last couple of months t...

Oh Lydia, you lured me. You teased me with the two or three short story gems that I happened to read first. That bar was set high and I had only high hopes for the future. My heart was won over but alas, big plans for our reader/writer love affair were dashed and destroyed as I read on and the stories went dooooownhill. Fear not dear Ms. Davis, I will not give up on you. Our affair is not over yet Lyds, I have Varieties of Disturbances and will give you another chance. Be warned dear one, no mor...

I started reading this as if I had found my muse, a writer's voice who said the things I'd always been urged to say, but couldn't say all that well. Isn't that a sign of great writing -- when someone else is saying what you wish you could? Short, tight, brilliant constellations of words. I was mesmerized, and, at the same time, thought maybe the moment had come to finally pick up my own pen. Driving home from the library I was forming my first Davis-inspired lines. But something must have happen...

Review WritingShe thought that perhaps she should limit the review to 805 words. This was the average length of the stories in the book. But the median length was far less. She researched, and estimated it to be 205 words. 27 stories had fewer words, the shortest one-pagers being one-liners. She thought to quote those shortest: Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: that Scotland has so few trees. he certainly looks indignantand Certain Knowledge from Herodotus These are the

Ensconced, as I am right now, in short stories, one could scarcely imagine a greater contrast with Alice Munro. This is not just because Davis does rather stretch – or should I say shrink – the boundaries of what a short story is. Take this, for example:Certain Knowledge from HerodotusThese are the facts about the fish in the Nile:That’s it, the entire enchilada. It made me google Herodotus, fish and Nile, which sent me to this rather wonderful quotation:There are many ways how to hunt crocodile...

My overall rating comes in at 2.5 stars. Here's why:Begin with the not completely irrelevant observation that I plunked down $17 to buy my copy of this book, having been seduced at least in part by McSweeney's hype. Seventeen dollars. Next, observe that here are some of the book's contents: (Note that each page is quoted in its entirety.)*Page 14: CERTAIN KNOWLEDGE FROM HERODOTUSThese are the facts about the fish in the Nile:page 44: SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT:that Scotland has so few trees.pag...

Lydia Davis has a gift for observation. I enjoy the moments in this book when I read about something familiar, but it looks different —I understand it better—because she has seen it clearly and is now helping me to do the same. She is also very precise in her writing. Every word has clearly been placed with purpose. There is a mean streak in some of these stories. While some authors would insert hope or moments of connection, Davis inserts self-sufficient commitment or even cruelty. I'm not sure...

A joy to read. Sweet like dried fruit, not candy. No, really. While many authors process reality so it's delectable and you want to suck on the words all day, Lydia Davis has a way of preserving the texture of a single moment or entire relationship so it's nummy, chewy, and yet immediately recognizable for what it was while fresh, alive, or being lived.

A return to form for Davis after the disappointing (to me, at least) Almost No Memory. I always end up skipping the longest story in Davis's collections because they're almost never as good as any of the other ones; in this case I skipped "In A Northern Country". I'll probably buy her Collected Stories anyway, so I can always go back and reread it. This is probably a good place to start if you've never read Davis before, also.

Lydia Davis paces her short story collections better than I know how to pace a novel, I think. Very intentional, sometimes so funny, sometimes a bit sad, always thoughtful—so much interiority and thoughts. Woolf's "moments of being and non-being" come to mind. One of my favorite stories in the collection is titled "Companion" and here is it: "We are sitting here together, my digestion and I. I am reading a book and it is working away at the lunch I ate a little while ago."

I loved this book. It is so weird and mad. Her writing voice is exactly like my train of thought. I felt like my craziness was expressed in a book.

Ain't nobody writes short stories like Ms. Davis. See those five stars? That's right, five. And because she's a genius, she breaks rules, and will twist your cranium at times, but most of all she will move you. I'm a big fan of McSweeney's, who first showed me the Light (of Lydia). I didn't figure out the title out until many years after I read this (probably because my historical knowledge is patchy at best). Who is Samuel Johnson? And why is he indignant? Read Davis, do a Wiki search on Johnso...

"Not long after Gus Van Sant got the bright idea of doing a shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock’s "Psycho" in color, I ran into him at the Calcutta Film Festival and asked him why in the hell he’d come up with that bright idea. "So that no one else would have to," he replied serenely. With his new film, "Gerry," he has removed another project from the future of the cinema and stored it prudently in the past. He is like an adult removing dangerous toys from the reach of reckless kids." - Roger Ebert...