Essays One Hardcover – November 12, 2019

Very interesting ,entertaining and insightful. Ms Davis brings the reader in the creative room of writers and artists with the nuance of a professional who lives and loves what she does. Waiting for “Two”.

I initially bought for one essay I’d read elsewhere and greatly enjoyed. So glad I did. I’m enjoying my new nightly reading.

Another amazing title from Lydia Davis. I highly recommend this title. Such an enchanting author.

It was a gift and my son loved it.

Lydia Davis is the closest thing I know to a cure for stupidity. She reads Internet chatter but only to find occasional nuggets of something that might or might not be truth. She analyzes a biblical psalm neither to convert nor confute but to find the secret of its charm and longevity. Her voice is the voice of talent nourished and corrected over the years by trial and error. She accepts her wrong turns and mistakes as a writer as avidly as she delights in her successes. She is the very model of a educated person. Do yourself a favor; step out of the ceaseless turmoil of sound bite politics, turn off the gaslighting and posturing and float, swim, and thrash with her as she makes her way through real life . She has the rare gift of explaining exactly why she decided on a particular rhetorical move and hypothesizing why other writers have made their particular choices. Spending time with her can make it easier to spend mindful time with oneself and sort out the important from the passing and trivial. She is as good a literary critic as can be found on this tortured planet today, eschewing the vatic pronouncements of a Harold Bloom, sparing the reader the babble of post-modernism and deconstruction and monotonous reiteration of race, class, and gender on the one hand and exhausted conservatism on the other. Mercifully, she gives reasons for her judgments. which cannot be foretold by rules of thumb or ideologies. She avoids what Sam Johnson called "cant."

Lydia Davis is dynamite, and it's wonderful to have a collection of her work. But the book is very thick and impossible to fully open, so it is a real chore just to hold it to read. It's a shame.

Arrived on schedule. Very satisfied

But I did love it. She is so clear and her vision so precise.

Outstanding. Profound, intensely varied collection: a great insight into Davies as a writer, reader and thinker. Some terrific pieces in this for people wanting to write at whatever level - others that are terrifically insightful about life itself. The final essay in particular is an absolute cracker.Even the essays on books I hadn't read were fascinating - Davis is a good enough writer to bring them to life. Haven't enjoyed an essay collection as much since Alexander Chee's extraordinary "How to Write an Autobiographical Novel".