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“... 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 old-growth trees in Canadian boreal forests merely in order to enjoy virgin toilet paper that is softer and tears more neatly ...”

“... What​  follows is part of an ongoing piece of writing which I can best describe as being the elaborated notes of what I have been discovering in my explorations of the history of the city of Arles – a history which goes back nearly three thousand years, so there is a lot to read. This essay began as notes taken during a visit to Arles in November 2018, when I gradually came to notice how, within the small area of the old city, over the centuries of occupation by different cultures, so many of the structures remained intact and were reused, adapted, enlarged, rebuilt etc, or if they were dismantled, the materials of which they were built were reused for another construction – this repetitive progression very well embodying the principle taught in basic science that no matter is either created or destroyed ...”

“... of ‘narrator’ and ‘first-person speaker’, but I need to begin by saying that what Lydia Davis proposes to us – even if (fat chance!) it’s a hoax from first word to last – is utterly compelling. As Auden would first look at a poem as a ‘contraption’ before going on to assess the kind of thing it might be, so one has to say of The ...”

“... down the embankment but couldn’t dislodge it. Then I remembered I had The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis in my backpack. I put it under the jack, it held – paper is much denser than you think, it’s the reason moving your books is such a pain, they’re heavy – and I changed the tyre. I was back in my truck, with the heat blasting out, turning ...”

“... In 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 shooting on location, recording the soundtrack at the same time as the images (so as to exclude music other than what the characters could hear), using natural sources of light and a hand-held camera ...”

“... Commune), as is the very latest, by the American short-story writer – and Proust translator – Lydia Davis. In between, most of the 15 or more versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s ...”

“... plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]There is a great deal of chance involved in all this. [Brian Nelson]It’s true that the first English version, Scott Moncrieff’s, has ‘There is a large element of hazard in these matters,’ but this has to be a mistake, or a visit from a ...”

“... Lydia Davis​ is big on lists. In her early short story ‘Break It Down’, the unnamed narrator attempts to balance financial and emotional ledgers in the aftermath of a love affair:I’m breaking it all down. The ticket was $600 and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days ...”

“... space in our lived life than the country we physically inhabit – and both Scott Moncrieff and Lydia Davis settle for it. ‘Like a halcyon’s downy nest’ sounds distinctly Edwardian. This must be Scott Moncrieff’s language, and it is. It’s Clark’s too. But then, to stay with the same passage, an elaborate evocation of the narrator’s ...”

“... In the reader, it produces a kind of constructive estrangement from words. Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson, and you won’t be too wrong. Now I feel like someone who thinks there’s a shower on the way, and then it rains for ten days straight. Williams is just full of alphabets. The first story is even called ‘The Alphabet’, and ...”

“... of extravagant self-conception doomed to mediocrity in the banlieue of Yonville – someone, as Lydia Davis put it, ‘whose character fatally determined the course of her life’ – is mirrored in a prose in which intention and automatism, will and fate, are themselves indissociable. The question of authorial intent has always preoccupied Fried. In ...”

“... is driven by a kind of grim joy, nor do they have the animated interiority of Lynne Tillman or Lydia Davis, whose currents of thought sweep up the reader and carry them along. Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation are exercises in psychological realism, but with most of the pleasures removed.Death in Her Hands is different. All the Moshfeghian ...”

“... Krapp, but stuck brooding on bananas and potential pratfalls. The more pressing comparison is with Lydia Davis. A few of the stories seem to ape the crisp, elliptical quality of Davis’s short, very short, texts. They are among the funniest pieces in Pond. ‘Oh, Tomato Purée’ is a half-page ode to a tube of ...”

“... of the past hundred years, and there have been a number of failed attempts to translate it. Even Lydia Davis had a go before admitting that ‘there are stylistic subtleties that I would not be equal to.’ Happily, in 2016 Pushkin published a wonderfully fresh rendering by Sam Garrett, the success of which has led to his translating two more of ...”

“... 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 ...”