Contemporaries Essays

But the invisible remains nevertheless. If we were to engage in an act of indirect translation of this phrase (trying to imagine the French of a source text which is…

From April 1971 to mid-July 1974, with the exception of a five-month stay in Sligo, Ireland and a shorter trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia, Lydia Davis lived in France. The spring following…

If I say that I’m writing from home, where is my writing directed to? If I say that I’m writing at home, it would seem that I also write when I’m not at home…

If you are, as I am, in the reductive mental habit of categorising things into mothers and fathers, Lydia Davis is a trap into which it is easy to fall:…

How many successful writers published one novel? Some would say Alice Munro, though Lives of Girls and Women is often read as a story cycle marketed as a novel.1 Many disillusioned readers and…

Critics and readers have always struggled to size Lydia Davis up. Indeed, the continuous critical indecision surrounding the form and genre of her work is bound up with the difficulties…

One of the difficulties of positioning Lydia Davis is that, when speaking of the genres that she writes in, mentioning only one of them obscures the others. She’s not a…

2003 July Father goes to look up word in dictionary and finds that he himself has been quoted as reference.             (Word was polysemous and dictionary was Webster’s 2nd or 3rd.) Georges Simenon claimed that he…

The second part of this page is intended as a guide for readers to navigate our cluster. But first, an introduction:    Lydia Davis tends to slip from people’s personal canons. Why? As…