An American virtuoso of the short story form.” —Salon
“Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more.” —Jonathan Franzen
“One of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Davis is the kind of writer about whom you say: ‘Oh, at last!’ ” —Grace Paley
“Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Frequently poetic and, without question, memorable . . . [Davis] tinkers with nearly every convention imaginable.” —Liam Callanan, The New York Times Book Review
“Sublime writing-at once a fantastical jungle and a real world.” —Brian Lennon, The Boston Book Review
“In deadpan prose, Davis turns philosophical snippets into fiction, with moving results . . . inevitable, as if she has written down what we were all on the verge of thinking ourselves.” —Ben Marcus, Time
“Davis’s distinctive voice has never been easy to fit into conventional categories . . . Engaging, self-mocking, and scrupulously truthful.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Brave, wildly unconventional and thoughtprovoking.” —Time Out (London)
“No contemporary writer has so bravely explored . . . The severe elegance of a thinking woman.” —Bruce Hainley, The Village Voice
“Witty and insightfully inventive.” —Paula Friedman, The Washington Post
“[These stories] are the hearts of stories—thumping, muscular miracles—and they circulate complex emotions with a marvelous efficiency of beats.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Will lodge in your mind forever.” —Ann Harleman, The Boston Globe
“Elegant and unsentimental. The best prose stylist in America.” —Rick Moody
“Extraordinary." —Catherine Texier, Newsday
“Davis is reinventing the short story . . . in our time.” —Charles Baxter
“All who know [Davis’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. [Davis’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 [she] writes . . . Davis is one of the most precise and economical writers we have.” —Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s
More dauntingly opaque but often brilliant snippets and meditations from MacArthur recipient Davis (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, 2001, etc.). Davis, an esteemed translator from French, writes in the tradition of the French postmodernists and surrealists. (She's translated Blanchot and Leiris.) The 56 stories in this volume include short prose poems ("The Fly," "Head, Heart") and chilling one-liners ("Suddenly Afraid," "Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans"). Two of the longer pieces adopt the dispassionate protocols of case studies. "We Miss You" exhaustively deconstructs get-well letters written by '50s-era fourth graders to a classmate hospitalized after being hit by a car. "Helen and Vi, a Study in Health and Vitality" analyzes how the workaday routines and altruism of two elderly women have contributed to their healthy longevity. (Contrast the intermittent, italicized foibles of narcissist Hope, age 100.) Many of the stories not overtly labeled studies are structured as such, with topical captions, such as "Mrs. D. and Her Maids," possibly about Davis's writer-mother. Parents, particularly aged parents, are a preoccupation: Davis has clearly done her time in the halls of eldercare. Her narrators are cynical and reluctant but "good-enough" caregivers. In "What You Learn About the Baby," a mother catalogs in excruciating detail just how her infant dominates and disrupts her life. The laconic "Burning Family Members" bears hard-eyed, shell-shocked witness to a father's death. Unabashedly autobiographical, like many of the stories, is "The Walk," a defense of Davis's translation of Proust's Swann's Way (2003) vs. the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, and "Cape Cod Diary," in which a writervicariously travels America with a nameless French historian (presumably de Tocqueville, also translated by Davis). Her impersonal, bloodless tone, plain prose style and tendency to summarize rather than dramatize can have a distancing effect; but Davis' ability to parse hopelessly snarled human interactions (as in the title story) astounds. An initially off-putting collection that gradually becomes habit-forming.
