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…
Contemporaries Essays
Minor, Marginal, Minimal, Miniature
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…
Positioning Lydia Davis
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…
Excerpts from Journal July 8 2003 — Dec 4 2005
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…
An Introduction in One-Liners
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…
Special Chairs
In the one-paragraph story “Special Chair” (2001), Lydia Davis describes the situation of writers who teach in the university system as one of shared longing. “He and I are both…
Three Poems
Mother: “Behind every successful woman there’s a sink full of dirty dishes.” — the journals of Lydia Davis, December 2003 Commerce I don’t believe in love. I believein commerce. I have…
Bored Housewives
In the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, an aristocratic, worldly mode of resignation yielded to bourgeois withdrawal into the “interior” — literally, of the home and, figuratively,…
Traumatized by Capitalism? Novels of Bored Workers
As Zadie Smith suggests in her recent essay collection Intimations (2020), the containment of pandemic quarantine revealed our need to find “something to do” — anything to pass the time.1 Driven by…
Boredom, Redux: A Reflection on Higher Education
Thus the [human individual’s] existence . . . is a continual rushing of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. And if we look at it also from…