Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis

Title: Can't and Won't 
Author: Lydia Davis 
Type: Short Stories 
Genre: Fiction 
Series: No 
Pages: 289 
Copyright: 2014 
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Summary: From Goodreads
A new collection of short stories from the writer Rick Moody has called “the best prose stylist in America”
Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of “Bloomington” reads, “Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.” Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in “A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates,” a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert’s correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author’s own dreams, or the dreams of friends.
     What does not vary throughout Can’t and Won’t, Lydia Davis’s fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.

Feelings:
This collection of stories varied greatly. Most of the stories were under a page long. There were a few longer stories. Most of the stories feel very normal. One of my favorite stories was about cows and how they looked in different weather and seasons. I found it fascinating and I'm not sure why because very little happened in the story. The cow story was one of the longer stories in the collection.

One of the first stories in the collection was about a dog that is gone and how the owner keeps expecting to see the dog. This story was powerful because anyone that has a pet they have lost can relate.

Over all I enjoyed the collection of stories. Some of them I liked a lot more than others but that is the case with many collections of stories.