The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
[Davis] is our Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew. Essays One…allows us backstage, into the creation and revision of her stories, her notes on her influences: Beckett, Babel, Paley, Kafka. A few pieces offer straightforward writing advice…"How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be?" [Davis] advises the novice writer in "Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits." "Read the best writers from all different periods," she says. She's right. Begin here.
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/04/2019
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.)
From the Publisher
[Davis] is our Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew. . . These pieces exalt clear language and the complicated work of looking and seeing. . . Davis takes pure pleasure in the muscular act of looking, and invites us to look alongside her.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"She’s so deeply cerebral it’s perhaps counterintuitive that Davis is a companionable presence. She’s erudite, with catholic interests, and earnest but not humorless. This is the kind of book you could read alone in a restaurant and feel you’re lost in a stimulating conversation." —Rumaan Alam, The New Republic
“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 . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"One gets the impression that even the most fleeting of pieces in “Essays One,” such as a few paragraphs about her favorite short stories, written for a British tabloid, has been given the precise and playful Lydia Davis treatment: 'Subtly, or less subtly, you always want to surprise a reader.'"— Brian Dillon, The New York Times Book Review
"Lively essays bound to stimulate debate among readers of global literature." —Kirkus Reviews
“Davis, an innovative fiction writer, is also an erudite essayist, critic and translator, with an ever-questing mind evident in these 33 essays . . . An essential literary companion.” —Jane Ciabattari, BBC
"Lydia Davis is one of those rare cases: an ambidextrous author who is just as capable of bowling a reader over with a short story as she is with an essay." —Malcolm Forbes, Star Tribune
"Lydia Davis is immensely learned; that is clear not only from her translation work but also from her distinguished discussions of the works she has translated. But in much of her nonfiction, she is also a master of the energies that drive her fiction, with its plain style, irony, sensitivity, and elegantly subdued power." —Sandra M. Gilbert, The American Scholar
"Davis is putting her more than 30 years of experience into a selection of essays on the craft of reading and writing; the first of the two-volume set comes out this fall. Don't expect run-of-the-mill advice like "show don't tell" here, though; Davis has made a career out of breaking the established rules . . ." —The Week
Kirkus Reviews
2019-08-18
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 life—writing 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.
