I’m not tired of all good books, I’m just tired of novels and stories, even good ones, or ones that are supposed to be good. These days, I prefer books that contain something real. I don’t want to be bored by someone’s imagination. Most people’s imaginations just aren’t very interesting—you can guess where the author got this idea and that idea. You can predict what will come next before you finish reading the sentence. It all seems so arbitrary.
From Lydia Davis’s story “Not Interested,” published in this month’s Harper’s and originally published in NOON.
Biblioklept 
Reblogged this on On Space.
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Pretty much seems to rule out the vast majority of contemporary fiction, which I agree is not worth reading. There is still gold to be found though, in writers like Bolan(i)o (although, being dead, there’s probably a limit to his output).
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Seems a bit sad to me to be honest. Often I find there’s a lot more truth and integrity in fiction. I can understand the traditional narrative becoming a bore, but imagination allows for plenty of surprises, so maybe she’s not looking hard enough.
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[…] This is the part of the not-review where I say that some of my favorite moments in Can’t and Won’t are Davis’s expressions of frustrated boredom with literature (or do I mean publishing?), like in the longer piece “Not Interested.” […]
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