[A] rich volume, more than 700 pages long and a deeply involving, extraordinary book.

I loved these stories. They are so well-written, with such clarity of thought and precision of language. Excellent

Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. She has a particular way with tone, briskly offering a fact or an observation as something true and useful to know, but also comic. She uses steely systems of dark irony as though she invented them... Davis’s sly, spiky system of imagining is opened out by tenderness, by sheer pain, by hilarity, often in the same paragraph. Her risky hit and miss system of storytelling is enriched by discipline and by the most surprising twists and turns; her stories display a sensibility of the rarest sort, allowing itself full exposure.

Lydia Davis’s lethally focused work takes precision to a new level... Davis’s lethally focused approach burns off character and plot; instead her pieces are more like thought sculptures or bits of verbal cartography, mapping out observations or dislocated states of mind.

Davis's humour is of a kind to make you simultaneously laugh and think. Her work, like that of Kafka – whom she cites as her biggest influence – is a semi-comic, semi-tragic investigation of the oddness of existence. It is experimental writing at its best.