Lydia Davis

http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events/2014/8/cant-and-wont-an-evening-with-lydia-davis

Hopefully there will be a podcast of this event.

I think she's brilliant, but I tried to read a whole collection on holiday and it was too much, you need to approach her sparingly I think, just reading one or two and letting them linger.

I spent July reading The End of the Story and Samuel Johnson is Indignant

I'm enjoying her new book, but so far I think her texts adapted from Flaubert's letters and her brief accounts of dreams tend to outshine her more characteristic pieces.

Hopefully there will be a podcast of this event.

She's done some good interviews recently that are available online -- WNYC Leonard Lopate; KCRW Bookworm.

seems like something i would like. is almost no memory what i want? i found this because i just read i love dick and it's mentioned in this thread.

I prefer 'Samuel Johnson ..' but that's 50% because I read it first

or at least because of all the things i read as a teenager in an attempt to be cool its the one i would be least tempted to dismiss today and to me at least that counts for something

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/books/review/05bkr-bythebook_davis.html?ref=review

She can read in Norwegian!

tick.jpg

i downloaded the big orange complete stories thing onto my phone and read it during brief idle moments like waiting for a bus or in a boring class. a+ recommended

i downloaded the big orange complete stories thing onto my phone. I read it during brief idle moments like waiting for a bus or in a boring class. Or I read the book on my phone. We read books on phones and sometimes these phones are orange but not big. A+ recommended.

thanks alfred

it needs a title

http://lithub.com/lydia-davis-at-the-end-of-the-world/

The big orange short story collection (textured paper! rough pages!!) was my first encounter with her as anything other than an excellent translator & I foolishly sold it when money was tight because I knew I could get 5 bucks for it easy :/

i was in a really bad/weird mood last week and i couldn't read her. got so impatient and annoyed. that ever happen to you? not with her maybe, but with someone you ordinarily like? she felt so precious all of a sudden. and i'm usually so impressed when someone can maintain that same tone page after page but last week it was driving me up a wall. in my head i was shouting: she's the rich man's richard brautigan!

but it'll pass.

My friend basically got the hives from reading "the grouch and old mother" and was furious at me for recommending it.

Although this friend is also someone who's always telling other people what they shouldn't be eating and why not, which is one topic of that story and a recurring topic in Davis's stories.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/10/feel-compassion-for-beleaguered-proust?CMP=twt_b-gdnreview

That book of letters is OK. But it doesn't deliver the comedy of a noise-maddened Proust I was hoping for. I did like the way he'll go on for pages about some fabric or whatever, but mentions in one sentence that he no longer has a secretary because the guy fell out of a plane into the sea, and offers no further details.

'ESSAYS' next -- later this year. The best of her essays on Reading & Writing, beginning with 'A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked: Forms & Influences I'

— Simon Prosser (@HamishH1931) March 1, 2019

Nearly here:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374148850

Have not yet connected with her own stories, but love her translation of Swann's Way---can't read French, haven't read previous translations, but as a stand-alone experience, it's amazing.

otm, i switched to her translation halfway through reading another mustier one and the difference was shocking

sry i did that for madame bovary

also i love her short stories

What I've read of her criticism has been really great. Her tastes in lit are very similar to mine too.

have you ever read joy williams?

they may not be as similar as I sometimes think because I read them at the same time. Joy Williams is quite gothic.

i love joy williams. she should be hipper imo, it's really hard to find her books

she's kinda the anti-Lydia Davis tho lol

Yeah I guess, but they are both really interested in dreams and dream interpretations and they both have a large interest in gaps and ommissions.

I will check Joy Williams out, thanks!

it's been a while since i've read either and there was a long gap between reading them so don't remember too specifics, but just in terms of prose style williams' sentences are so knotty long and wild whereas davis' are immaculate short and cute

I was so into Gordon Lish's baroque-ification of Carver's posthumous collection Cathedral that I followed up with other authors he edited, this was my intro to Williams. She's great, I read a collection of hers in a couple of days

Sorry, what's Williams' connection to Carver?

Oh, they have/had the same editor?

The big orange short story collection (textured paper! rough pages!!) was my first encounter with her as anything other than an excellent translator & I foolishly sold it when money was tight because I knew I could get 5 bucks for it easy :/

I've been there, too. it is hard to shake the regrets. it can take a decade or more of quietly mourning for the loss. (sighs)

it’s still in print. i can buy you a copy if u want bro

lol

The original paperback collections I bought for a buck apiece

xyzzzz u r herne hill right? i'm leaving on wednesday (moving to islington) and discovered I have two copies of joy williams escapes if u want one? otherwise its going to oxfam. not sure how i'd get it to you i guess dm me if ur interested.

Hi plz indeed I am. Let me try and DM you my address now

*plax

Just did it now, did you get it.

got it!

Thanks 👍

my pleasure. hope you enjoy it. I read an interview with her once where she said something about how her difficulty with writing dialogue was solved when she realised that she could make her characters say whatever she wanted them to. it might have been in her paris review interview which is very good and worth reading. I think she is very good, honored guest is the collection I like the most and escapes is patchier but the good stories are very good and there's a couple that I have read more than several times.

👏👏👏

Omg did you get this?