Can't and Won't (urspr publ 2014; utgåvan 2015)

purchased from Biblio affiliate ... ( )

I'm glad Lydia Davis does her thing. I'm unsure we need 280 pages of it, and I'm starting to get a bit suspicious of people who talk about how she's the best thing since sliced bread. I'm starting to suspect that her work will be seen, in hindsight, as peak MFA writing. But also like reading a blog back when people still wrote blogs. ( )

Lydia Davis does the short, short story masterfully, as usual. This collection didn't resonate with me as much as her past ones, though. ( )

Some of the stories, I liked. Others, I did not. ( )

When I liked the story, I really liked it.
But sometimes, I wondered if this was a story or an elaborate literary joke, like Finnegan's Wake.
Finnegan's Wake is basically trolling as literature.
I considered if my antipathy to some entries was jealousy of a naive sort: "Surely I could write something better than this!" And "I wish my three line stories were compared favorably to Proust."

I am not sure. I remain unsure. ( )