"Among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction." --"San Francisco Chronicle """ "Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more." --JONATHAN FRANZEN "All who know [Davis's] work probably remember their first time reading it . . . Blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction." --DAVE EGGERS, "McSweeney's ""Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising." --JOYCE CAROL OATES "The best prose stylist in America." --RICK MOODY "A body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. I suspect that 'The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis' will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions." -- James Wood, "The New Yorker""" "This welcome collection of Lydia Davis's short fiction, which gathers stories from four previously published volumes, reveals that her obsessions have remained fairly consistent over the past 30 years: frustrated love, the entanglements of language, the writer engaged in the act of writing. But even when Davis traverses familiar territory, her masterful sentence style and peculiar perceptiveness make each work unmistakably distinct. Davis is known for her ability to pack big themes into a tight space; many stories here are less than a page, and some consist of only one sentence. The longer pieces frequently find her narrators making much out of the seemingly meager. In "The Bone," which first appeared in the collection Break It Down, a woman describes in detached detail the night a fishbone was caught in her now ex-husband's throat. In "The Mice" a narrator feels rejected by the mice that will not come into her kitchen, "as they come into the kitchens of [her] neighbors."--Kimberly King Parsons, "Time Out New York" "Lydia Dav