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There just aren't that many authors I can read at a time like this. I've found myself going back to favourites--and even there the news is hard to leave alone for longer than a few minutes at a time. Still, my appreciation for the likes of Lydia Davis has never been stronger. The following is a complete story which strikes me as perfect. Or maybe I think that because the world now feels more like it's been written by Lydia Davis than it ever has before. LOVEA woman fell in love with a man who ha...
Davis needs no introduction, nor pithy summary. These stories are mathematical riddles, little sentences twining and twirling around their own meaning. At the end of the collection, I felt as though trapped at the centre of a maze, as though reading them backwards would free me from the spiral of captivity. Her style is homely-cum-brainy, the self-awareness of a part-time egghead, part-time wife-and-mother. The shorter stories tickled me the most, the longer ones felt like forced digressions. Ho...
A very good collection of stories so short and rich it begs to be consumed like a pack of Maltesers. Still, better to savour each one individually, because, like Maltesers, tempting as it is to wolf down one after the other, in excess they’ll leave you crumpled on the floor, groaning in self-pity. Aside from the barrage of tightly coiled one-page punches and a handful of longer more descriptive pieces, this collection also contains a smattering of unsettling, seemingly inconsequential but eerily...
Has Lydia Davis invented a new form?Is it just a form so old (fables and whatnot) it's new?I so love Lydia Davis but, reading a whole book, I realize I love her stories taken individually, in sips/steps. The textures of them--so uncommon--begin to feel flat when collected.
This was my first read of Lydia Davis. I normally like prose that hits me in the guts. The way that Ms. Davis was occasionally able to achieve this even with her economy interests me greatly. I will definitely be looking forward to reading more of her.
Lydia Fucking Davis. Making me feel lonelier and less insane with every story. These are perfect to read while stuck in traffic or when you don't want to fall asleep too quickly.
I was disappointed by 'Samuel Johnson is Indignant,' which had a great title. I was even more disappointed by ANM, which did not have a great title, and had most of the bad qualities of the following volume (dull, generic short stories; fascination with a very narrow strip of human experience; over-use of the contemporary "talky but also intelligent because I went to a good school" style) with less of SJiI's best qualities (formal inventiveness; humor; Satie-esque irreverence). Not to say that A...
This review appeared in The Nervous Breakdown back in 2007:There is high genius here. Of the fifty or so stories, I will return over and over to perhaps ten of them. And even as regards the ones I won’t return to, it is most often a question not of fictional failure but of personal taste, the way someone else might not understand my enthusiasm for Hopkins, and I might not understand their enthusiasm for Swinburne, but we can still play buzkashi together, for example, and eat some bacon, if both
I resonated with a few of the stories in this book, but mostly it felt too personal for me to relate to.
At her best, Lydia Davis creates strange little worlds that revolve around their own logic, a logic both strange and beautiful. A town with 12 woman, and a 13th who doesn't fully exist; a town where the woman become trees; an analysis of what a man means when he tells his lover to "go away" - these all make sense in the context of Davis' structuring, even though you'd sound crazy trying to describe them as stories. Her amazing use of language is displayed in stories like "The Outing," where 8 br...
Fiction is one of those arts that makes something out of nothing, and Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory makes more something out of a balder nothing than any book I can remember ever having read. The blank piece of paper they started as is always within sight throughout every line of these fifty-plus stories. In execution, Almost No Memory is a collection of unconventional achievements, some only a few dozen words long, others stretching out to ten or so pages. Dialogue is nonexistent. Davis’s men,...
This collection of stories simply did not work for me. It was as if Davis' first collection were a representational oil painting and this one is a cubist version of it. Th ese are really non-stories rather than slices of life.To me, the book is a very internal journey centered around questioning the nature of reality and the meaning of one's feelings. This abstract quality made it pretty tedious reading. I did like a few of the stories; "In the Garment District" and one or two others reminded me...
The short stories are like windows. How's she's seeing something, how you're seeing something all in the context of the story that becomes a fabulous overlay. I guess I'm just fascinated by the writing. I have never read anything written in a similar style. It feels so... genuine. At first, it felt a little childish, but as I read through more of the stories be became a language that turned simple observations into meaningful occurances."Affinity" sums everything up perfectly.