Can’t and Won’t: Stories by Lydia Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Lydia Davis is a joy to read, especially in her shorter works. She considers the larger possibility of connection, and draws lines between aspects of things, what you would expect of a situation, what occurs in that situation, and how that occurrence makes sense of what happened but simultaneously is always-already different from your expectations. Often this has to do with what people expect of us, other times its what we expect of them, other times its through various musings in which we see that they aren’t quite where they could otherwise be. These stories are almost like micro-stories, in that their happening takes place at a subterranean level one which we understand intuitively but often dismiss because such partial occurrences are irrelevant to our every day aesthetic of what counts as experience.
