SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
Narrator Janet Metzger takes on the challenge of Davis’s unique short story collection and creates an interesting listening experience. This collection of 122 stories ranges from one-liners taking mere seconds to some longer works lasting several minutes—one is just shy of an hour. Metzger’s delivery is sure and steady. She captures the author’s sense of examining the routines and absurdities of daily life through stream-of-consciousness points of view. Her tone remains serious, steady, and consistent whether she is recounting a dream, sharing an anecdote built on something from Flaubert’s letters, or imagining what is going through the minds of grazing cows. Davis’s quirky short stories aren’t for everyone, but Metzger’s consistent narration will draw in listeners willing to take the journey. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Peter Orner
[Davis's] stories have a way of affecting the senses so that indecision itself becomes drama and a mutual shrug between two strangers can take on more meaning. This is what the best and most original literature can do: make us more acutely aware of life on and off the page. To read Davis is to become a co-conspirator in her way of existing in the world, perplexity combined with vivid observation…this collection is as mercifully flawed and awkward as her characters themselves. Call Lydia Davis the patron saint of befuddled reality…What Davis is attempting to express is the wild divergence of human experience, how the ordinary and the profound not only coexist but depend on each other.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/13/2014
With her fifth collection, Davis (Break It Down) continues to hone her subtle and distinctive brand of storytelling. These poems, vignettes, thoughts, observations, and stories defy clear categorization; each one is an independent whole, but read together they strike a fine rhythm. Davis circles the same central point in each entry: her characters examine the world with a detached, self-contained logic that seems to represent the process of writing itself. Some of the best pieces in the collection are the shortest, like “Brief Incident in Short a, Long a, and Schwa,” which ends: “Ant backtracks fast—straight at cat. Cat, alarmed, backs away. Man, standing, staring, laughs. Ant changes path again. Cat, calm again, watches again.” Others dwell longer on their subjects, such as “The Cows,” which depicts the movements and relationships of members of a herd, as seen from the window of a countryside home, or the memories of a woman whose older half-sister has recently died in “The Seals.” Several stories, set in 19th-century France, begin with “story from Flaubert,” and go on to tell of Provençal kitchens, fairs, and executions. There are also disgruntled letters addressed to a frozen pea manufacturer, an Alumni review, and a peppermint candy company. These repetitions give the collection a cadence, and Davis’s bulletproof prose sends each story shooting off the page. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today.”—Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker
“This is what the best and most original literature can do: make us more acutely aware of life on and off the page.”—Peter Orner, The New York Times Book Review
“[Can't and Won't] is evidence of a writer who is in total control of her own peculiar original voice; its pleasures are unexpected and manifold.”—Kate Christensen, Elle
“A master of sequencing. Davis mixes long and short dispatches to intoxicating effect.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“The most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years.”—John Freeman, The Boston Globe
“Drop everything and pick up Lydia Davis's fifth collection of short stories...Observation, drama, and (yes) compression—it's all there, giving the most minor moments a kind of epic weight.”—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.”—Claire Messud, Financial Times
“Davis dances right up to and around that final mystery that can't, won't, and must be borne, that most inexplicable magic trick, life's vanishing act.”—Parul Sehgal, NPR
“Davis is official literary dynamite...Everything she writes looks effortless.”—San Francisco Chronicle
SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
Narrator Janet Metzger takes on the challenge of Davis’s unique short story collection and creates an interesting listening experience. This collection of 122 stories ranges from one-liners taking mere seconds to some longer works lasting several minutes—one is just shy of an hour. Metzger’s delivery is sure and steady. She captures the author’s sense of examining the routines and absurdities of daily life through stream-of-consciousness points of view. Her tone remains serious, steady, and consistent whether she is recounting a dream, sharing an anecdote built on something from Flaubert’s letters, or imagining what is going through the minds of grazing cows. Davis’s quirky short stories aren’t for everyone, but Metzger’s consistent narration will draw in listeners willing to take the journey. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2014-02-13
Five years after a mammoth, comprehensive collection of stories secured her literary legacy, this unique author explores new directions and blurs boundaries in writing that is always fresh and often funny. For one of the country's most critically acclaimed writers (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, 2009), a new collection is like a box of chocolates, one in which—as she writes in "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates"—a single piece can be "very good, rich and bitter, sweet and strange at the same time" and can feed "a vague, indefinite hunger, not necessarily for food." As previously, her shortest stories—a single sentence or paragraph, well less than a page—could often pass as the prose equivalent of a haiku or Zen koan, and elements such as character development, or even characters, are often conspicuous in their absence. The narrative voice has a consistency of tone throughout much of the collection: conversational, intelligent, by no means opaque or impenetrable like much postmodern fiction. It flows easily from dreams to conscious reflection, often about words themselves or "Writing" (the title of one very short story) or reading, ruminations that may or may not be the author's own. As the relationship between writer and reader becomes more familiar, one gets a sense of a narrative character and of what's important to that character (grammar, concision, precision) and how she spends her time (in academe, on various modes of transportation, among animals in the country). Some stories are based on the letters of Flaubert (whom Davis has translated, along with Proust and others), while others are unsigned (and unsent?) letters to various companies and boards, comments and complaints that often themselves turn into stories. In "Not Interested," the narrator explains, "I'm not interested in reading this book. I was not interested in reading the last one I tried, either....The books I'm talking about are supposed to be reasonably good, but they simply don't interest me....These days, I prefer books that contain something real, or something the author at least believed to be real. I don't want to be bored by someone else's imagination." Whether fiction or non, Davis never bores.
