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. She presents long passages of text for our inspection, like X-rays, teaching us to read Jane Bowles, for instance, clause by clause ... Davis returns to a series of virtues repeatedly: clarity, compression, frank emotion, oddness. She has a preference for overheard speech, 'tangled, yet correct, syntax,' and, very often, for writing that reinterprets a text or pokes fun at conventional, sentimental writing. The book itself embodies these qualities with its commentaries on writers and its puckish awareness of its own genre — those valedictory sermons on craft from the established writer, those moist and vague maunderings on the virtue of 'storytelling' ...'Read the best writers from all different periods,' she says. She’s right. Begin here.

The book’s raison d’etre is not to preserve these individual pieces—though some of what’s in here is quite worth saving—it’s to elevate Davis to the office of a Great American ... well, again, it’s hard to know what word to use. Let’s just agree that Davis, now 72, is an elder stateswoman of American letters ... when you read [Davis] at length—these essays run to more than 500 pages—you realize just how chewy and complicated she is ... It’s a pleasant surprise that Lydia Davis is so engaging on the subject of Lydia Davis. Few writers have anything useful to add to contextualize their art. Then again, few writers make the kind of work that really needs some explication...It’s refreshing to hear her explain herself...Or, most of the time anyway ... Anyone weighing going into debt for an MFA should know that they can instead buy this book ... 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 ... As a critic, she is perceptive, yes, but also truly engaged ... we can’t all be Lydia Davis, but thank god we have her.

As an essayist she is still admirably lucid, but she is simple in transparent sub-clauses; she is brief over 500 carefully honed pages. In this study of the craft of writing, Davis draws generously on her own experience as a writer and translator. When she is following a line of thought we feel, as she remarks about Stendhal’s experimental autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, that 'we are privileged to watch what is really a very dramatic moment, enacted again and again,' of 'the unformed being formed, the internal becoming external, the private become public.' Though Davis herself resists the term 'experimental' as it implies a degree of intentionality alien to her, at their best these pieces always contain elements of experiment in their willingness to reach for what is not yet known ... Despite their stress on taxonomies, on knowing it all, Davis’s essays are continually pulled towards the incomplete and mysterious ... Davis grasps...that since any highly articulated picture is an illusion, 'a picture that seems less complete may seem less of an illusion,' and therefore more realistic. Essays One is full of such insights ... it achieves its form and its authority not through design, but through patient accumulation.

... a master class in literature from a genius ... [Davis] is an accomplished translator (most famously of Proust and Flaubert), with the requisite attention to language’s subtlest shades, but she also enjoys stilted expression and linguistic misfires, using both to great advantage in stories that seriously delineate laughably granular—and often circular—concerns. Her best work shows how humiliatingly childlike our best thinking often is ... This volume gives us the backstory of her genius: the books read and translated, the paintings admired, the habits of mind diligently developed, the assorted bits of life that made their way into her art ... Reading Davis, you notice your own wild mind laboring in the background ... following along with Davis’s thought is taxing, and it’s no small relief in Essays One when she admits that she doesn’t understand something. True to form, she illuminates her incomprehension brilliantly ... The book is diverse and discursive and extremely hard to summarize ... I was also struck by her voice. She’s earned the right to be oracular, but refrains, instead adopting a humble and helpful tone: she just tells you what she thought at each step of the essay and what she did next, like a skilled engine mechanic describing an improvised solve on the side of the road ... Davis refracts the singular beauty of boundless curiosity and care.

Lydia Davis’s Essays One provides a wide-ranging look at how Davis both makes and interacts with art ... Davis does not divulge...much about the process by which she reaches the detailed, unsentimental readings of her subjects in Essays One, but their clarity and depth reflect...careful reading and rereading ... Davis’s essays, spread out over the course of a mammoth volume, have a...studied feel to them ... clearly the product of sustained engagement ... Davis demonstrates the fruits that extreme and repeated attention can yield ... She pays evocative attention to the experience of reading...alongside a convincing description of how that experience is constructed. Crucially, she uncovers how the trick is accomplished without ruining its effect—something Davis attempts with less success when writing about her own work throughout the book ... At their best, Davis’s insightful essays also demonstrate how fruitful writing with time and care outside the publishing industry’s relevance cycle can be.

Davis...does for the essay what one of her subjects—Rimbaud—did for the prose poem: fires language with emotive, radiant wisdom. Her inherent generosity...shows us that process ... Lucid observations, and the curiosity—probing, restless—behind them thread through 34 short- and long-form pieces, closing with the haunting, and haunted, 'Remember the Van Wagenens.' Perhaps Davis's finest gift is to remind us we're each only temporary manifestations of life ... Those familiar with Davis's work, and even new readers, will find much to ponder—even love—in these wholly enthralling explorations across time, place, and people.

This is quite a long book in praise of brevity ... These essays, written over several decades, illuminate Davis’s own processes while attending to the work of writers and artists she admires. She is in some ways the most honestly solipsistic of writers – her narrators are rarely set in the context of society or even company; their voices, conscious of written language, emerge with minimal framing ... Her essays about experimenting with genre experiment with genre ... There are inspired responses to other obsessive de-clutterers, from the artist Joseph Cornell and his boxes of ticky-tacky to the compiler of the Oxford English Dictionary, James Murray, and his web of definition. There is a rangy meditation on the idea of fragments, which includes a memorable section on the poet Mallarmé’s use of the ellipsis ... There are lists of recommendations for good writing habits, with digressions on digression, and a focus on etymology, for knowing the metaphorical origins of words ... The voice of these essays never forgets its own limitations, or the inherent comedy of passing critical judgment.

In the craft essays that make up the bulk of Lydia Davis’ collection Essays: One, the pleasure is always immediate, the joy near at hand ... Her embrace of a freewheeling attitude is not a prescription for slovenliness. Throughout, she demands that writers hit the dictionary — a real one, a physical one with thorough etymologies — and explore word histories, test them for sound and effect ... funny, witty ... Davis is as adept at conducting this kind of close reading with others’ work as her own ... the most charming of the non-craft essays is a piece on early 20th century Dutch tourist photographs, where you can feel her being drawn heedless into needing ever more information on the clothing, folkways, and routines suggested by the image.

Many of the essays in Essays One are dry instruction ... very intelligent but dry; more instructional than inspirational. There may be a few frissons of bright imagination that escaped from Davis’ fiction into this collection, but not many, and for the reader, not enough. This reviewer holds to the firm conviction that imagination is like fairy dust. Remove the fairy, and what remains is dust ... The best part of Essays One are the many poets and authors Davis considers influences, these will be useful for Davis’ admirers to pull out from Essays One and dig in to on their own.

The focus is on English language authors (she plans another volume on translation) and, above all, Davis’s own writing: where it comes from and how it works...This last point in its own right makes Essays a valuable collection: so clear and honest is Davis in her forensic exploration of how her work is formed that it also feels like prying, or – put another way – a free course in reading and writing fiction for the price of a hardback book ... The detailed accounts of her writing process in these essays feels like her getting all of this out of her system ... David also writes convincingly about other writers and visual artists .... Other essays provide a valuable guide to books we will never read, such as Stendhal’s biography The Life of Henry Brulard or Michel Butor’s Degrees, a 450-page novel set entirely in a train compartment. Davis’s Essays, a 520-page book set entirely inside the author’s capacious brain, should never suffer such abandonment.

What a pleasure...to linger longer within the mechanisms of Davis’s mind in this collection of her non-fiction work ... To read Davis is to be jolted out of complacency. One comes away from Essays optimistic that such hyperfocus can be honed ... At some 500 pages, Essays hasn’t quite the heft of Davis’s Collected Stories, which one critic reported using to jack a car to change a flat tyre. Even for the most hardcore of Davis devotees, however, the volume might have merited further culling. A handful of essays on visual artists, including a piece on her husband, the abstract painter Alan Cote, feel extraneous. But that aside, Essays is a treasure trove of wisdom on the pleasures of reading and writing. I eagerly await bedding down with further reflections from Davis — on translation and learning languages — with the publication of volume two.

Few writers are equally at home in the realms of fiction and nonfiction. Excellence in one field is often mere competence in the other. 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 ... an indispensable compilation of nonfiction ...the book’s standout essays are those that are grouped under the heading 'The Practice of Writing.' Beyond this off-puttingly dry title are a variety of incisive and informative pieces about Davis’ craft ... The longer, meatier highlight of the book, 'Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,' constitutes an in-depth, invaluable master class ... Throughout, Davis reinforces points with useful examples, attentive close readings and numerous pearls of wisdom ... There is little here on Davis’ other main occupation, translation. That, though, will be covered in a second volume of essays. More good things will come to those who wait.

At their best, Davis’s essays resemble her celebrated short stories...which are wryly occasional...worked up from dreams, diaries, notebooks, letters of complaint and stray phrases from emails ... Essays One is dominated by pieces about writers and writing. It’s a joy to read Davis on John Ashbery’s wedging solid Anglo-Saxon words into his Rimbaud translations, on Lucia Berlin’s admirable monosyllables or on the young Thomas Pynchon’s 'heady sense of a smart college boy’s power over language.' ... Davis’s essays about visual art...are consistently stranger and more compelling than her merely wise and brilliant reflections on literature ... Outside of a handful of more intimate pieces [Davis] is not really an essayist, critical or personal, in a determined sense. Or is she? In its skewed relation to the real, her fiction already lives on the outskirts of the form. No matter. One gets the impression that even the most fleeting of pieces in Essays One,...has been given the precise and playful Lydia Davis treatment: 'Subtly, or less subtly, you always want to surprise a reader.'

...masterful ... No single piece could capture the essence of this extraordinary writer, but a new reader might wish to start here ... These essays illuminate Davis’s patterns and choices, though her gaze is not only turned upon her own technique ... Throughout this volume, the reader is grateful for Davis’s precision and attention ... Like all of Davis’s work, these rich essays address how we build up a coherent picture of the world ... Read these essays: see everything around you in a clear, fresh light.

Including 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.

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 ... 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 Essays One, Davis’s talents as a writer of both poetic and prosodic tendencies are on full display ... On the whole, the essays in each section are sharp in their analysis, but the sections themselves don’t communicate an overlying structure or purpose ... Essays One takes readers through the 'unsuspected' rooms of Davis’s mind: an endless series of queries about work habits, elements of writing, works of art, the difficulties of translation, photography and clothing, the concept of time, and even her family’s strange, fortuitous connection to Abraham Lincoln. Her love for language is what drives her curiosity and guides her penetrative eye; the journey is rendered in exquisite prose ... to read Essays One sequentially from cover to cover is to float in Lydia Davis’s limbo. Part of this limbo-like feeling comes from her persistent and often repetitive questioning. Davis sometimes crafts entire half-page paragraphs of only questions, most of which are rhetorical, some of which are relevant, very few of which are answered. A bit of her thinking, in this sense, feels unfinished ... Davis is at her best when she is most personal and open, when the lens of her analytical mind is turned inward and she blends her criticism with examples and experiences from her own life ... She may not know what she’s after or how to get there, but there are few writers today who are as easy, and enjoyable, to follow as Lydia Davis.

The first in a planned two-volume collection of the nonfiction of short story author Davis...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 ... 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.

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 ... Lively essays bound to stimulate debate among readers of global literature.