Lydia Davis is a legend unknown to the average reader, let alone the average American. Her list of honors is endless. She has been called "influential," "inventive," and a "virtuoso" by the most stellar of critics. Her work has been lauded by the LA Times Book Review, McSweeney’s and Salon. I hadn’t read her work before and must admit that I was startled and amazed by it.

It is literary. For literary one could substitute words like original, well written, smart, and experimental. Experimental not in the sense that she works with a new style, but in the sense that she works with none.

Davis eschews any style, any element of fiction that writers have studied to improve their craft in decades past. In fact, her work seems a throwback to what stories must have been originally as folk sat around fire pits telling tales before any artifice at all—any real technique—had been brought to storytelling. These stories are stark. So much so that they feel strained.

Her writing is basic, like bones found in the Great Rift Valley. Bones that have been there for eons. Unconnected. She shows rather than tells and her language is undecorated.

One might argue that Davis’s attention to detail, the pure and spare language, is an artifice of its own. There is no dialogue. I didn’t see a metaphor or simile anywhere in her work (though the book is very fat and I didn’t peruse it a second time). Rather her stories are slices of life retold as one would remember them or think them up. Faulknerian in that they move backward and forward in time, pared streams of consciousness.

I’m taking the part of the child in "The Emperor’s New Clothes." These stories are naked. Perhaps exquisite in their essential storytelling, but also distant. Perhaps intriguing detail, but also meaningless. It isn’t that I believe in bow-tying or that a storyteller must be making a point we can discern. Still, I think most readers—even those who love literary work—expect something beyond observation, beyond a drill. These stories are so existential, so desiccated, one may prefer to read them one a time. These are not stories to be devoured. They will be, for some, stories to be examined.