Review by Booklist Review
Davis is renowned for her piquant, mischievous, and emotionally astute very short stories, gathered most recently in Can't and Won't (2014). This sizable and scintillating collection is the first to showcase Davis' nonfiction. Much of the pleasure in these agile and illuminating literary inquiries is found in her tales of how she came to write, what led her away from traditional short stories to pursue her particular style of brevity, and how she works. Davis' readers relish the quick feints and thrusts of her concise stories, and here we discover just how much revision is involved in their composition. In Revising One Sentence, a piece which has itself been reworked over the years, she explains how she not only revises the words but also the thought of the sentence. Other essays focus on her close readings of such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Lucia Berlin, Rae Armantrout, and Maurice Blanchot, her use of found material, and her delight in surprise, exactitude, and the absurd. A second volume about her work as a distinguished translator of Proust and Flaubert is in the offing.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The first in a planned two-volume collection of the nonfiction of short story author Davis (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant) proves a cornucopia of illuminating and timeless observations on literature, art, and the craft of writing. A master of short, punchy prose works, Davis discloses her influences, some of which may be surprising even to longtime fans, including Roland Barthes, Franz Kafka, and Grace Paley, among many more. In a few essays, Davis presents first drafts of her own work along with the final versions, annotating and explaining revisions and providing an instructive window into her process. Interwoven throughout are short pieces on some of Davis's favorite artists, or alternatively, those whom she finds pleasingly confounding. In the latter category is expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, whose 1973 work Les Bluets Davis credits with helping her to accept and embrace the inscrutable. Invaluable is the 2013 piece "Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits," which outlines best practices for creative writing, from honing one's observational techniques to crafting believable dialogue. Fans of Davis's unfailingly clever work should add this volume to their collection, and creative writers of every genre should take the opportunity to learn from a legend. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The first of a proposed two-volume collection of essays from one of America's most ingenious short story writers.The goal of these essays, writes Davis (Can't and Won't: Stories, 2014, etc.), is to "reflect, to some extent, two of the main occupations of my lifewriting and translating." Included here are pieces that range from an appreciation of authors such as Samuel Beckett, Grace Paley, and Franz Kafka, whose works inspired the extremely short stories for which Davis is most celebrated, to essays that reflect her thoughts on the work of translation. Among the latter are essays on John Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations, in which she praises Ashbery's approach "to stay close to the original, following the line of the sentence, retaining the order of ideas and images, reproducing even eccentric or inconsistent punctuation"not surprising, given that she, too, has been praised (and criticized) for the same approach to translation. Many of the authors Davis explores are French, from famous names such as Proust and Stendahl to comparatively obscure writers such as Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris, author of the multivolume "autobiographical essay" The Rules of the Game. Essays on visual artists such as Joan Mitchell and Joseph Cornell are less insightful than the pieces on literature, and some essays rely so heavily on excerpts from other writers' works that it feels like Davis is showcasing their opinions rather than putting forth her own. However, at her best, she's an astute critic, as when, in analyzing early works by Thomas Pynchon, she notes his tendency to go "beyond eloquence to a kind of hyper-eloquence that becomes a display of power over language itself that perhaps borders on control by coercion," or when she writes of poet Rae Armantrout, "under the lens she turns on everything, the refractive lens, a bland world loses its blandness.I see more clearly because of the way she sees."Lively essays bound to stimulate debate among readers of global literature. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
