“... her friends Ed and Helene Dorn. The lack of variety is puzzling (why not a few of her letters to Lydia Davis, say?) and the letters are not interesting in themselves, but they are worth reading to hear how much more herself she is in the stories. In the letters, curiously, she sounds like just anyone. She even goes through that phase where you open with ...”

“... preference for short, fragmentary forms (which can seem to prefigure those used by a writer like Lydia Davis, who has translated some of Walser’s writings on art) over the epic and ‘mature’ monumentality of the novel. With Hannah Arendt’s advocacy, Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares were seen as having predicted the rise of the Third Reich, and ...”

“... 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 from which they draw their standards of political health and psychological well-being, and the text from which they draw their hopes and fears is a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old treatise written by a French aristocrat of 30 who had spent barely nine months in the country ...”

“... might have proved useful to a writer churning over material she’s used before, as in the case of Lydia Davis. I started to think of reading Munro’s sentences as something like walking across a field after a blizzard in a good pair of snowshoes: it’s a trudge, but when you get to the other side your feet aren’t wet. A new turn comes with Friend of ...”

“... Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies ...”

“... doesn’t imply the presence of at least one other character too. Take this sixty-word wonder by Lydia Davis (it’s called ‘The Outing’):An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on ...”

“... wholeness. Williams prefers a sense of fracture and ambush. There’s no sense, as there is with Lydia Davis, whose taste for brevity amounts almost to obsession, that there is a moral hygiene involved in removing the superfluous, except perhaps in the piece numbered 61, which might almost be a homage to Davis; it ...”

“... multi-volume study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, and of Beauvoir’s America Day by Day; Lydia Davis, a translator of Proust; or Richard Sieburth, translator of Leiris, Michaux and Nerval. Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English ...”

“... with the Center for Writers and Translators in Paris (other volumes in the series are pieces by Lydia Davis and Alan Jenkins and a forthcoming work by Paul Muldoon). One of Pevear’s test cases is a sentence in which Tolstoy repeats a phrase with apparent (or indeed perhaps real) carelessness: ‘Nine days after the abandoning of Moscow, a messenger ...”

“... many readers would like, leaving them short of guiding threads through his labyrinthine sentences. Lydia Davis proposes that his ‘marked underuse of the comma’ shows not a lack of consideration but a subtle courtesy, by refusing to allow arbitrary subdivisions to get in the way of the reader’s attempt to grasp a complex thought in its entirety: if ...”

“... when he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with Colette? Lydia Davis suggests it might be, in her introduction to Rachel Careau’s new Chéri. Another reason may be the quality of some of the translations of her work: Roger Senhouse’s widely used version from 1951, as Careau points out, has phrases like ...”

“... microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law ...”

“... alleged suicides or to the living people connected with them – the source that provided Natalie Davis with rich narrative material for her Fiction in the Archives. There are distinct signs of generosity here. In the case of Michelet le Cavelier, who, like Testard, killed himself by jumping out of a window, this time in the rue de la Ferronnerie in ...”

“... The best of these microhistories – Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre – succeed in making their stories what Kenneth Burke calls ‘representative anecdotes’, reflections of reality that are inevitably selections of reality. The selections work if they manage to convey a sense of both ...”

“... preferred being attractive in the depraved modern way, like Dietrich and Garbo, or maybe Bette Davis, and dressing, like the rest of the modern world, in imitation of Paris. Folk-dress invoked notions of national purity, meaning no make-up and no permanent waves, no smoking and no cocktails. Some eager Nazi supporters went in for it, but only the very ...”