The following is one testimonial, along with a few excerpts from the new book.

I was first hit with Lydia's work not all that long ago, when Courtney Eldridge, a frequent McSweeney's contributor, handed me a copy of Almost No Memory, which she was appalled I hadn't yet read.

All who know Lydia's work probably remember their first time reading it. It kind of blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction. I read it on the F train from 6th Avenue to Park Slope — it's a long ride and that book isn't all that long — and by the end I felt liberated. She'd broken all of the most constraining rules. Some of her stories have plots but most don't. Some are in the range of acceptable short story length, most aren't. Many straddle a line between philosophy, poetry and fiction, categories that seem meaningless because her stories just work. There is rarely a plot as we expect from plot. The characters in the course of the story don't undergo a fundamental change. The plot, rather, stems from the narrator's trying to get at some truth. Lydia's stories are as often as not mental exercises, a brain trying to conclude.

Because truth is what she's after. There is an unrelenting and merciless truth presented, or at least fumbled for, in everything Lydia writes. Each time she addresses a subject, like simple interactions between husband and wife, she cuts through to its essence, without fuss, in a way that renders most other treatments foggy, lacking in courage.

But after getting at this core, she's gone. This is why some of her pieces are only one short paragraph long. In Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, a number of the pieces clock in under thirty words. A good example:

THEY TAKE TURNS USING A WORD THEY LIKE

"It's extraordinary," says one woman.
"It is extraordinary," says the other.

That's the whole piece. And yet its brevity is wholly logical and its truth is complete. There's nothing more to say, and there's no need to couch this exchange within a larger context, or even name its setting, because we know it already. We know these women, we know just about everything about them, by the syllables they emphasize. This sort of economy is why Lydia's work is sometimes called poetry.

Besides being some kind of poet, she's a celebrated translator from the French, and her work as a translator is often cited as influence on or evidence of the workings of her mind. Just as the task of a translator is attempting to get something as right as possible, given the limitations of one language speaking for another, so does the writer in Lydia Davis attempt to find words and sentences that accurately render the truth of a situation.

But it almost never works. Or it works, but the truth it arrives at is only one truth, a partial truth. And words' inherent fallibility is one of her primary concerns. She works with words for a living — writing, translating and teaching — but she doesn't trust them, not completely at least, to get the job done. Which is to say nothing of her frustrations with memory, detailed in her last collection with the telling title. How can you accurately recount something if you can't trust your own recollections, let alone your ability to choose the right words?

But despite her doubts, Lydia Davis is one of the most precise and economical writers we have. In his testimonial on tomorrow's site, Rick Moody calls Lydia Davis "the best prose stylist in America" and it's hard to think of anyone whose work is at once so distinct and so deceptively simple. And Lydia Davis strikes a funny balance, between being one of our most exacting writers, while also being ever-conscious of the limitations of language.

Examples of this dilemma abound in her work, from the stories in Break It Down to the novel The End of the Story — her attempt to recount a failed relationship, to put it back together, becomes the book's plot — and are certainly abundant in these last two collections. In my favorite of the longer pieces in Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, a story called "In a Northern Country," an aged and frail man named Magin travels to the remote Russian village of Karsovy, searching for his brother, a linguist who left months ago to study the community's ancient and singular language.

Upon arriving, Magin's brother isn't there, but evidence of him is. His notebooks are still intact, on a shelf in the hut where Magin is allowed to rest. But because Magin doesn't speak the villagers' language, and they speak only a few words of his, he can't learn the fate of his brother. And the trip to the village and the blinding winter cold have left Magin weak, hardly able to speak. He lies in a bed, in a strange hut, watched by people making indecipherable sounds. And here, lying and searching for breath, he must wonder about not only his brother's fate but his own. Here's a passage from "In a Northern Country."

     In the morning, the pain had climbed into his throat, so that he could not swallow without tears coming to his eyes. As though mocking his own darkness, the sun shone over the bed where his limbs gleamed through the rents in his clothes. He looked at his body and saw that it was wasted: the veins stood out over his arms where the flesh had shrunk, and his skin was like parchment. His lungs drew little air into his body; his chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly.
     He listened to the early air, searching for some sound to root him in the world. Bird songs circled away through the woods and back again. A dog barked once. A man called out and another, nearby, answered. A footstep brushed the dirt close to Magin, and looking up he saw the woman's face in the doorway.
     "Ning," she said, smiling.
     Magin tried to raise himself from the bed, but had no strength in his arms.
     "Oh no. No, no, no," the woman cried in English with a look of horror on her face, throwing back her head.
     "Listen to me," said Magin.
     The woman took a breath and rushed on.
     "No: tk. Uurk, uursh."
     Magin turned away from her. His pain deafened him.
     The woman hobbled quickly to the door and called out: "Ruckuck. Tk! No, no!" Magin heard the sound of people coming: a soft rustling and then the ground shaking outside his door.
     The people crowded into the hut, filling it with the smell of burning wood and tobacco.
     "Tk. Pshsht uuril," said one man, softly.
     Magin shrank from the crowd above him.
     "Ning," said the woman.
     "No, tk, no pshtu tori," said another man, bending over Magin and breathing on his face.
     As each minute passed, Magin felt the need for silence more desperately, and his fear grew. He wanted to be alone, to think of Mary, to breathe, and to sleep.

And while this ranks among her bleakest of stories, her humor is what surprises and seduces so many unsuspecting readers. This is clear in the Extraordinary story reprinted above, and also in a piece like "A Mown Lawn," which we published in our fourth issue.

She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.

This piece was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2001, edited by Robert Haas and David Lehman. At the back of that collection, where contributors are asked to comment in a few paragraphs about the writing of their chosen poem, or about their work in general, her entry reads:

Of 'A Mown Lawn,' Davis writes: "Towns lawns all mown, some poisoned, all free of weeds, all free of cover, some planned plantings, no loose small animals, no loose insects, some pets, some penned dogs, some tied and housed dogs, some pests, in effigy: effigy of raccoon, effigy of deer, effigy of Canada goose (no nibbling, no nuisance, no ruin of planned plantings), unmoving goose flock feed on poisoned mown lawn, red bows on necks come holiday."

Which again proves Lydia Davis incapable of doing anything in a conventional way. Her bravery and her unwavering search for not the truth — which she implicitly acknowledges is not possible to find, recall and render, but maybe in its place an in lieu-of-truth truth — makes her work, even when it takes place in a living room in upstate New York, spellbinding. Here's one last piece that in a few lines sums up the human conundrum

SPECIAL

We know we are very special. Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?