alison_kinney 's review for:

4.0

I'm a huge Lydia Davis fan, but this volume didn't impress me quite as much as the three other short story collections from her that I've read. Among the best stories here are the two mock case studies, in which she allows incongruity, sententiousness, and the one-liner, all of which she's shown to brilliant effect in previous collections of short shorts, to develop into deceptively simple but richer long narratives. Now, having said that, I also have to say that I don't support the presumption that a longer story must necessarily be better/richer/whatever than a short one, and I hate the kind of stylistic conservatism that that kind of presumption shows: Davis has written plenty of one-sentence stories that can blow away other writers' 6K-10K-word masterpieces. But those stories are in her other collections. Still, I love her more than turtles.