Lydia Davis is the author of a novel and eight story collections as well as two books of essays and many translations. In 1999 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2015 an Officier, both for her fiction and translations. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Her latest book is Into the Weeds, about a lifetime of reading and writing. She will deliver the 2026 LRB Autumn Lecture in New York: ‘Dying, or Doing Something Else: Reflections on Marcus Aurelius and Other Stoics’.
There is a short street near the place de la République called the rue des Carmes. It has a dog-leg bend in it, and just at the bend is the doorway of a bookshop specialising in small-press poetry books. You learn that when you walk down this street, south from the rue de la République, which is at your back, you are walking down the centre of what used to be the nave of a large church, the Church of the Carmelites.
Dear Who Gives a C**p,
Thank you for the recent shipment, which arrived promptly. I’m glad to have it. I feel good about using recycled toilet paper, even if it does not always tear off the roll neatly and is a little coarse, though we quickly got used to that and may even come to like it. In any case, I would rather suffer a slight discomfort than be complicit in the felling of...
The first few pages of Into the Weeds give the impression of someone starting to regret that she ever agreed to conduct a behind-the-scenes tour of what amounts in the four volumes of the uniform edition...
It seems, in the end, that an obsession with words, their proper order and their etymologies, is nothing less than a search for proof that time existed.
I n her approach to story-writing Lydia Davis might almost have taken a vow of chastity, of the aesthetic sort publicised by the Dogme 95 group of filmmakers. Dogme principles included...
If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will...
The truck’s wheels slipped on the hardpack and I went for a tree, missed it, bounced off the snow bank and spun around to settle against the opposite side of the road. I got out to look at...
What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is...
Nothing in me wants to believe – nothing in the book makes me want to believe – that The End of the Story is a performance, but just for that reason I have to begin by saying what a...
When Americans test the health of their republic, scrutinise the civic virtue of their fellow citizens, or worry that religion is playing too large or too small a role in public life, the text...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.