Once again, it’s not so much plot as a steady accretion of apparently insignificant details: the narrator is a competent but indifferent cook, married to a man with rather set views on food. Collapse is inevitable and it duly arrives. But it is delivered in the classic Lydia Davis manner: you might almost miss it entirely until a second reading, and then there it is, sharp, subversive and very funny. Davis specialises in quiet savagery and never wastes a word.
(Almost No Memory, 1997; now in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Penguin)
A Personal Anthology 