For The Millions, Adam Boffa compares Lydia Davis’s short stories to social media. He argues that Davis’s compressed language, as well as her emphasis on routine and tragedy, works to “recreate a phenomenon that occurs daily on social media”:
Davis’s work, and maybe social media at its best, becomes a sort of celebration of the ordinary, the boring, the totally expected, the regular. They both identify and even welcome the power granted by our taking stock in those things we might otherwise overlook. And they implicitly acknowledge the ability of our boring lives to help us recover after tragedy; they know that persistence can be resilience.
