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Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

A reworking of the Preface of Essays 2 and a response to “Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)” featured in Essays 2 by Lydia Davis

(a completely non-collaborative collaboration, written with great admiration) A note on the below pieces:  When I was invited to participate in this cluster dedicated to Lydia Davis, my first instinct…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis / Maurice Blanchot, invisible

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis in France in the 1970s

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

Flâneuse of the Quotidian

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

Maternal Grammar

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:…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

The End of the Story?

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, Lydia Davis

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis

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…