Mixed3 A.M. MagazineIncluding review essays and writing lectures from the past three decades, Lydia Davis’s first non-fiction collection, Essays One, offers some elusive answers ... It does not explicitly delve into the meaning of Davis’s work, but it does provide an intriguing glimpse behind her obscure and tightly controlled craft, suggesting to the dedicated reader a few ways to interpret the particular kind of short prose that is Davis’s signature achievement ... The reader of this collection must deal with a certain level of condescension ... When reading essays such as these, the question arises: under what circumstances do the minutiae of a writer’s practice become significant? What compels the writer to explain her craft in such detail, and what kind of reader is so eager to know? Such things are excused in a pedagogical setting, of course, but Davis’s didactic style pervades many of her critical essays as well. She is an astute close reader, especially of poetry, and the critical essays in this collection do treat their subject material with a wonderfully microscopic level of explication, but the general feeling is that Lydia Davis is teaching us how to read ... Despite a personal relationship with many of her subjects...she keeps to the work and the work alone ... To the extent that this runs counter to the tendency of contemporary essayists to delve constantly and shamelessly into the personal, it is refreshing, but the analysis is left feeling rather bare ... A certain anxiety may persist in this endless attention to craft, in the description of minute edits applied to sentences that are as banal as the small corrections one might make to an email.
Gerald Murnane
RaveZYZZYVA\"Perhaps we are fortunate, then, that Gerald Murnane has not lost this connection, for his writing is unlike anything being published today. It could be the way Murnane works his prose, filling it with repetitions and pulling out commas so the syntax shines like glass; or it could be something about all these nameless men and boys walking their small parts of Australia, dreaming about women and grass and clouds. In any respect, Murnane is one of the rare few actually working to alter the experience of reading fiction, and it is time his works are recognized more fully in this regard ... Murnane has a reputation as a highly solitary person, and this is reflected in his fiction. His characters are often solitary people who read a lot of novels, and they accordingly have a tendency to experience the world as this dire, shifting web of strings between images, thoughts, and narratives out of which a clean pattern may hopefully be extracted, or at least recognized.\
Yoko Tawada, Trans. by Margaret Mitsutani
PositiveWords Without Borders\"...a slim and bitingly smart dystopia ... Contrasted against the indicting societal critique in The Emissary is the warm relationship between Yoshiro and Mumei, as well as the elegant and often poetic language used to describe Japan’s future ...Tawada is a superb writer, to be sure, and with more interesting vision than Murakami, but it is clear that The Emissary describes a future with a similarly light tone.\
Denis Johnson
RaveVol. 1 Brooklyn...this new collection of stories gives a more direct and relatable impression than ever of the recently departed writer. It is difficult to read The Largesse of the Sea Maiden without participating in some way of his memorial ... Some of the passages are imitative, it is true, like a conversation at a one-way peep show clearly right out of Paris, Texas, while others remind us of their brighter counterparts in Train Dreams or Jesus’ Son, but the language is finely crafted overall, and some of the sentences are truly striking in their structure... There is something about Johnson’s short fiction, after all, that we love, but seems difficult to grasp; something unbounded by the typical trajectories of published work. Perhaps this is because it channels an older form of storytelling, one which ruptures the normal images of life until they resemble the kind of dreams in which anyone can be captured or saved or thrown down and defeated.
