Soulless stories, lacking heat, heart and blood. As if written by a technical-engineering-report-writing analyst. Or a 1990s version of an AI.Innumerable times Davis uses the continuous present tense (first person, second and third), but rather than drawing in the reader to the story and characte...
Reading Lydia Davis inspires critics to come up with fun metaphors to describe the experience, so here's mine: her "Collected Stories" is kind of like a modern art museum. For folks accustomed to representational art-- which in literature, I guess would entail plots, character development, confl...
Lydia Davis is to short stories as Barbara Kruger is to collage, ok? And while I would give Kruger five stars for all kinds of things, like breaking new ground in the museum art world, I would give Lydia Davis five stars just for being enjoyable. I like, also, how her style is so like dated to th...
This is the first time I've read anything by Lydia Davis so I confess I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I added it to my hold list after seeing the title on NPR's year-end book concierge for 2014.I enjoyed this collection of short stories, but I'm not sure I really "got" it. (I...
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a...
and now for something different … Lydia Davis. Born in Massachusetts in 1947, of American parents – dad a professor, mother a writer and teacher. The family lived in Austria for a year when she was seven, Lydia learned German. Later in New York, in a private school, around the age of ten, she lea...
As a break from the theoretical turn Evening All Afternoon has been taking of late, let me rhapsodize straightforwardly about the numerous things I love in the writing of Lydia Davis. In particular, I've just finished her 2004 The End of the Story, which treats of the end, beginning, and aftermat...
Lydia Davis has been called "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times), "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon), an innovator who attempts "to remake the model of the modern short story" (The New York Times Book Review). Her admirers include Grac...
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...
The people in front of us are taking a long time choosing their ice cream. My thumb hurts. A man is coughing during the concert. The shower is a little too cold. The work I have to do this morning is difficult. They have seated us too close to the kitchen. There’s a long line at the shipping coun...