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I like the last story and the first story and some of the other stories.I like "The Fish."
4.5*- Story 4*- The Fears of Mrs. Orlando 4*- Liminal: The Little Man 3.5*- Break It Down 5*- Mr. Burdoff's Visit to Germany 4*- What She Knew 4*- The Fish 3*- Mildred and the Oboe 4*- The Mouse 4*- The Letter 4.5*- Extracts from a Life 3*- The House Plans 4*- The Brother-in-Law 4.5*- How W.H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend's House 4*- Mothers 3.5*- In a House Besieged 3.5*- Visit to Her Husband 4*- Cockroaches in Autumn 3*- The Bone 4*- A Few Things Wrong with Me 4.5*- Sketches for a Life o...
I heard the story "Break it Down" on This American Life and had to check this collection out. The title story is so great. I love it. The rest of the stories in the rest of the collection share a similar narrative style, but hardly any of the emotional weight. They read more like clever exercises, but after just a few I realized I didn't particularly care about the people, the story, or the ideas she was playing with. It reads to me as sort of "academic literature," where they kiss the story and...
It's not a pleasant sensation, reading Lydia Davis. She writes well, she's a disciple of the "simplify, simplify" school, but.... I take my words now from the response I wrote to Break it Down for class:There is much within-ness within Davis' work. It invites the reader to examine herself, and not in the cajoling way that some texts have of encouraging such examination, but an inescapable one that isn't necessarily optimistic or pretty. I sometimes feel as if Davis reveals more about me to mysel...
I was bemused by the fact that Lydia Davis, whose translation of Proust's Swann's Way is so excellent, is also likewise a superb writer of short stories. In Break It Down: Stories, some of the stories are very short indeed, often no more than a middling paragraph in length.What struck me first, however, was the almost complete lack of dialog, it being one of the principles of the modern short story that the reader is drawn to come to his own conclusions by reading what the characters say to one
Are you kneeling and putting your hands on the carpet like that. Are you. On the carpet, your hands are on it?
Amazing--so incredibly underrated. Raw, real, and painful. These prose pieces stick with you and eat at you throughout the day--they never leave the reader. The title piece is incredible, reads so easy. I devoured this book and wanted more the second I closed it. Absolutely recommend--leaves you feeling changed yet the same.
perfect for the holidays … very short fictionOne of Davis’s influences, from a young age, was Samuel Beckett. In this interview http://www.believermag.com/issues/200... Davis talks about her craft and other things literary. Here’s a second interview with very little overlap to the previous one: http://brickmag.com/interview-lydia-d.... boneless fiction It’s been said that Davis has, with her short stories, created her own genre. Well, what is this genre? I’ll be so bold as to attempt a descrip...
This book pissed me off a little. It's not that there aren't flashes of greatness in this ultra-short story collection. Because there are, particularly in the title story. But at her very worst, Lydia Davis inundates her readers with terse anecdotes or observations that don't seem to have anything going for them. They aren't linguistically or rhythmically interesting. They don't suggest or allude to some Grand Ineffable Something going on behind the scenes. They aren't affecting. They aren't amu...
Wow, I guess I’m not a big fan of Lydia Davis’ early work. I’d read some of her stories here and there over the years, and was always impressed by them. But most of the stories in this first collection just left me muttering, Gee, Miss Gloomy, I get it, life sucks, your point being?All the characteristics of her style (dry understatement, detached examination of emotional minutiae...) are present, but shoddy, imperfect, unrefined. Some recurrent themes seem to be: our difficult relationship with...
“I thought that since I was better, my therapy should end soon. I was impatient, and I wondered: How did therapy come to an end? I had other questions too: for instance, How much longer would I continue to need all my strength just to take myself from one day to the next? There was no answer to that one. There would be no end to therapy, either, or I would not be the one who chose to end it.”
