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"Lydia Davis is one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction. Her language has such an inspiring air that it's difficult to read without putting her book face down and writing yourself." — Benjamin Weissmann, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Reading Lydia Davis, one of America's foremost innovators of short fiction, is like reading good French prose: sensibility pared to the bone, sober wryness that ruthlessly rejects platitudes." — Greg Burkman, The Seattle Times
"Lydia Davis has been considered an American virtuoso of the short story form since the publication of her first major collection, "Break It Down" which was met with unreserved critical acclaim." "Introspective and subversive, ironic and playful, obsessive and funny, Davis' stories reveal the ratcheting of the imagination and the ineffable movement of the mind over the varied textures of daily life." — Kate Moses, Salon
"[S]he works at ... an attempt to remake the model of the modern short story." — Liam Callanan, The New York Times Book Review
"WITTY and insightfully inventive, Lydia Davis's new collection justifies the critical acclaim." "Almost No Memory defies categorization, incorporating as it does traditional elements of the short story and fable along with elliptical riffs that plumb the layered depths of human thought and experience." "The pared-down syntactic play in pieces like "Foucault and Pencil" recalls the minimalist prose of Samuel Beckett's late work, though Davis's vision remains at least a few shades brighter than his." — Paula Friedman, The Washington Post Book World
"In her dazzling new collection, Almost No Memory, Davis considers many of these same conundrums: What is interesting, boring-are those two states always distinguishable? What is a story, as opposed to a poem, prose poem, or marginalia? What is writing? "Davis's prose may look like fiction passing as poetry, in that even though there is a narrative, it often almost evaporates, leaving something poetic rather than what is usually considered fictive; it is just as easily classified as theory or philosophy. "Davis, one of the finest translators of contemporary French writing into English, is deft at parsing the first person. "Davis's The End of the Story (1995) is one of the Frenchest novels ever written in English. That doesn't stop it from being one of the greatest American novels in many decades. "Davis constructs her texts with surgical precision, alternating long, graceful, soaring sentences, which often spiral inward on themselves, with those that cut quick. "Few writers acknowledge so astonishingly the possibilities of inertia, boredom, admit the difficulty of understanding, or recognize understanding s dependence on not knowing. "Davis never makes me feel this way. Her prose is so writerly, it comes as close as is possible to giving the impression that you are writing it while reading. "These are the plain pleasures of Lydia Davis: dissonance's grammar (and grammar's dissonance) her genius. "As is fitting for a writer who contemplates quotidian processes and conclusions, this new collection is stunning, but refuses to be a culmination of her work to date; rather, it makes her earlier writing resonate more deeply and hauntingly, banishing any foolish apprehensions that what had been going on wasn't richly complicated all along." — Bruce Hainsley, Voice Literary Supplement |
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