Wow! I debated for a long time whether or not to read Can’t and Won’t, even disliked the excerpt on Google Books. But thankfully when I asked for flash fiction recommendations, Lydia Davis was recommended so highly I had to trust the people whose taste in literature I really admire.

So after all, I think it was a matter of timing: at the right point in time, the stories I previously disliked resonated a completely different way. There are so many brilliant, shining moments in this collection, I can’t wait to reread it! A lot struck a wonderful chord in me, but one stuck with me in the aftermath of Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle and Men: The Cows. It brims with so much love, it’s impossible to shake it off — very much like Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. That wasn’t the only story that resembled DYPotBotD in tone either!

But as expected of any collection so wide and ranging, there were just as many misses as hits. Still I was leaning more towards 4 stars for Davis’s brilliance, but the last stories were all misses after misses that I did not end the book on the best possible of notes.

All this said, Can’t and Won’t is a definite recommendation!