Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0374102813, Hardcover)

An inventive, moving collection of short prose pieces about human intimacy, identity, and the "oddly tragicomic ways of human life" (Washington Post Book World). A wife who tries to cook healthy dinners for her corned beef-loving husband contemplates her marriage in "Meat, My Husband." In "Foucault and Pencil," a trouble analysand on the way home from a session attempts to distract herself with a difficult French text. "The Family" describes a wrenching afternoon at the park in forty-seven actions. "To Reiterate" plays with the words and meaning of a single sentence. In "Glenn Gould," a new mother and former pianist tries to justify her dependence on "Mary Tyler Moore Show" reruns. Lydia Davis's new collection, "Almost No Memory," is an inventive array of playful philosophical investigations, involuted domestic disputes, and fables of the dark fantastic. With restrained intensity, she portrays the contemplative self caught in the paradoxical world. Davis makes the most of every word with pieces ranging from a paragraph to a page to several pages. The stories in "Almost No Memory" reveal an empathetic, sometimes shattering understanding of human relations, as Davis, in a spare but resonant prose, explores the limits of identity and logic..