Lydia Davis

I am in love with The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. If you’ve never heard of her (like me, until about a month ago), you will likely be quite surprised by her work. She writes very, very short stories – some are just one or two lines. Her writing is funny, illuminating, mysterious. She somehow captures the mind in action, something that is hard to describe but wonderful to observe. Her work also accomplishes that most essential and magical work of good fiction – it somehow changes the way I think and see the world. I first noticed this when something happened in my own life, and I was thinking it over, and I suddenly realized that I was thinking like a person in a Lydia Davis story.


No one selection will really illustrate her work well, but here is a bit from “Examples of Confusion”:

Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it and for all the animals I have been seeing in the road and by the edge of the road. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I appear to feel sadness for the paper bag.

That’s an example of capturing a thought, or emotion, or something, that I know I’ve had but have never been really conscious about, the way feelings bleed into inappropriate situations. Also, for me it brings up the memory of the rainy night my daughter was hit by a car and lying in the street, and then another driver ran over her – he said later that he saw something in the road, and thought it was a garbage bag. Kind of the opposite of what happens in Davis’ story, but surely another example of confusion. (My daughter recovered, by the way, after many months and many surgeries.)

Here's one of the amazon reviews:

Lydia Davis is a rare and wonderful writer, a word master with an uncanny ability to reveal the inner musings of the mind. These are short stories to savor and revisit.

I love this book.