#Lydia Davis

[soulmaking]

"He admired the sublimity of her soul and the lace on her petticoat."

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated by Lydia Davis

[exhaled-spirals]

« It is not easy to live with another person, at least it is not easy for me. It makes me realize how selfish I am. It has not been easy for me to love another person either, though I am getting better at it. I can be gentle for as long as a month at a time now, before I become selfish again. I used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers [...]. For instance, [Hippolyte] Taine said that to love is to make one’s goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time. »

— Lydia Davis, The End of the Story

[deadpoetsmusings]

[yiiiiiiiikes25]

[swartzmark]

[gravity-rainbow]

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart.

—Lydia Davis, "Head, Heart"

[daughterofdrearburh]

[days-of-reading]

Somewhere in the files of General Mills is a letter from the very-short-story writer Lydia Davis. In it, Davis, who is widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today, expresses dismay at the packaging of the frozen peas sold by the company’s subsidiary Cascadian Farm. The letter, like many things that Davis writes, had started out sincere and then turned weird. Details grew overly specific; a narrative, however spare, emerged. “The peas are a dull yellow green, more the color of pea soup than fresh peas and nothing like the actual color of your peas, which are a nice bright dark green,” she wrote. “We have compared your depiction of peas to that of the other frozen peas packages and yours is by far the least appealing. . . . We enjoy your peas and do not want your business to suffer. Please reconsider your art.” Rather than address her complaint, the company sent her a coupon for Green Giant.

Dana Goodyear, “Long Story Short: Lydia Davis’s Radical Fiction,” New Yorker (March 17, 2014)

[pav-anne]

Lydia Davis

[darkbloomiana]

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[megawhitething]

The Fish She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Lydia Davis

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Vanessa Stockard (Australian, b.1975) :: (Guillaume Gris)

* * * *

Lydia Davis, famed for writing stories as short as a few words, has won this year’s Man Booker International Prize. Adam Sherwin offers some examples of Davis’ works:

Index Entry

Christian, I’m not a

Getting to Know Your Body

If your eyeballs move, this means that you’re thinking, or about to start thinking.

If you don’t want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.

The Outing

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.

All taken from The Collected Stores of Lydia Davis, published by Penguin Books. [via The Dish archive]

[viecome]

Desde que empecé a escribir me sentí cuentista… Lydia Davis

Jamás me he considerado novelista. Desde que empecé a escribir me sentí cuentista… Bueno, si me remonto a los orígenes, lo primero que escribí fue poesía, aunque aquello era más bien una suerte de conjuro verbal. La novela surgió cuando llevaba más de veinte años escribiendo cuentos. Tengo un amplio espectro de registros, desde una o dos líneas hasta un párrafo, una página, dos páginas, y en…

[whisperthatruns]

At dusk, when our light is on indoors, they can’t be seen, though they are there in the field across the road. If we turn off the light and look out into the dusk, gradually they can be seen again.

They are still out there, grazing, at dusk. But as the dusk turns to dark, while the sky above the woods is still a purplish blue, it is harder and harder to see their black bodies against the darkening field. Then they can’t be seen at all, but they are still out there, grazing in the dusk.

Lydia Davis, The Cows (Sarabande Books, 2011), as seen in Sean Singer’s daily email, The Sharpener 

[girlwithlandscape]

“The dog is gone.  We miss him.  When the doorbell rings, no one barks.  When we come home late, there is no one waiting for us.  We still find his white hairs here and there around the house and on our clothes.  We pick them up.  We should throw them away.  But they are all we have left of him.  We don’t throw them away.  We have a wild hope--if only we collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again.”

— Lydia Davis, “The Dog Hair”

[thingummygirl]