Hello everyone. We have good news: Lydia Davis's new collection, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, is now available. Copies can be had online, though us, or on Amazon, and at most bookstores.
Many months ago, when we first knew we'd get the chance to publish Lydia
Davis's new book, we held a reading at Housing Works in New York City, where
Jonathan Lethem and Zadie Smith read new work, They Might Be Giants played,
and Lydia read from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.
Few of the audience members had heard her read before — her readings are
rare. And though much of the crowd wasn't previously familiar with the
pieces she read, and many weren't familiar with her work at all, everyone
was spellbound. Her presence was commanding but she was also very warm, very
funny, once or twice laughing a little at her own work. She even read "Oral
History with Hiccups," a story that on the printed page requires vast
experimentation with the space bar, and read aloud required Lydia to
actually fake a series of hiccups in the middle of various words. It was
amazing.
In the audience that night was David Byrne, who was enchanted and with whom
Lydia recently read at a benefit we held downtown. They make a strange and
fitting pair, and now their work will be in at least one way forever
entwined. In a weird twist, a photo that Byrne had taken and was included in
The New Sins became the cover of Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. While we were
laying out the book and trying out possible covers, Byrne's image was used
as a backdrop for the type, more as a placeholder than as any kind of
definite idea. But it somehow worked, and Lydia really liked the image of
the Virgin Mary juxtaposed with the seemingly unrelated title — and we did,
too. (Note that the covers of the book that were on hand at that last event
were advance copies, had a few defects, and have been significantly altered.
If you bought a book that night, it's one of about 300 with that particular
cover.)
The point is that you should hear Lydia Davis read. As a primer, you can
hear her read stories from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, including "The Old
Dictionary" and "New Year's Resolution," here in RealAudio, on the
Conjunctions website.
And we should have mentioned sooner that in concert with our publication of
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, Farrar Straus & Giroux is reissuing Lydia's books, Almost No Memory, Break It Down, and The End of the
Story. They're available at these independent bookstores, among other locations.
III.
This is what it feels like to encounter Lydia Davis's writing: you're on a
bus, a city bus, and you find yourself being recruited (because you're
polite and sympathetic) to listen to the earnest and quietly plodding
discussion your seatmate is having with himself. Your seatmate, for whom you
are providing this tremendously charitable service, is a bland, unremarkable
fellow, possibly his fingernails are a bit grotty and his suit shiny and
old, but otherwise he's just a person riding a bus, delivering a measured
treatise on the unethical treatment of reindeer in Wisconsin. Quite possibly
your mild-mannered seatmate is missing a few salad forks from his silverware
drawer, but even so you feel compelled to hear him out, you even indulge in
the occasional patronizing nod and say, indeed, it's really savage what
they're doing to those reindeer up there. Then, because you're bored, you
start to listen a bit more closely and as you do so, his sentences begin to
warp into the lines from a naively zany and wondrous logic proof. You
understand, now that you're actually paying attention, that your seatmate
isn't really talking about the unethical treatment of reindeer in Wisconsin,
but about loneliness, and obsession, and lovesickness, among other things.
The more you listen the more apparent it becomes that this man without the
right number of salad forks is actually quite a bit more brilliant and
insightful than you are — in fact, you realize, by the time you've reached
your stop, that you're the one without the salad forks, that this guy has
all the salad forks, and you're just some fool person riding a bus.
— Heidi Julavits
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IV.
Some years ago, as a book reviewer for TimeOut New York, I drew — or perhaps
requested — the assignment of an interview with Lydia on the occasion of the
publication of Almost No Memory, a collection of pieces that, despite their
brevity and indirectness, still managed to suggest both the vitality and the
precariousness of the human condition.
The shortest piece, if I recall correctly, was only fifty-seven words, which
is the length of the first sentence of this paragraph. Perhaps it was even
shorter. Lydia was appearing at the National Arts Club in Chelsea, and we
agreed to meet at Friend of a Farmer, a restaurant near the club.
While I waited for her, I watched a couple at a table downstairs. They were
fighting over some sticking point in their relationship: someone had wronged
someone else, and that someone else had decided that being wronged in this
manner was intolerable. They spoke like this: "dissolving the bonds. " They
didn't seem angry. They seemed sad and slightly disoriented. At one point,
the man wondered aloud whether it would be prudent to give things another
try. The woman said she would consider it; then she got up to go to the
bathroom.
That's when Lydia appeared; I knew her from the picture on her book jacket.
"Lydia?" I said. For some reason it seemed more polite than "Ms. Davis."
"Yes," she said. "Hi," I said. We sat upstairs, in a small room just to the
north of the main upstairs dining room, and we discussed a series of topics
in a leisurely manner, never raising our voices in argument, never lowering
them in conspiracy. I took notes only occasionally, when Lydia said
something that I knew I would use as a quote in my piece. We talked about
genre, of course, about what characteristics define a piece of writing as
fiction, or literature, or a story, or an essay, or a pensée, or a memoir.
We talked about memory, about how no human experience ever committed to
prose has the status of a pure record.
We talked about Proust, of course, and probably Borges, and probably
Barthes, and maybe Stendahl. The interview was excellent: she was careful
with her answers, sometimes funny, always sincere, and she had a habit of
posing questions to me in response to my questions, which was not annoying
but rather gratifying, inasmuch as it acknowledged that while the situation
had created an artificial distinction between the roles of interviewer and
interviewee, we were both writers seeking answers to problems that had
bedeviled other writers for millennia.
When we finished up, and I went downstairs, the couple whose romantic fate
had been hanging in the balance was still sitting there — or rather, the man
was still sitting there, as if he'd been waiting for the woman to return
from the bathroom for hours. I don't know what happened to them. I do know,
more or less, what happened to Lydia. She continued to write, and to
translate Proust, and to try to pick the locks of the problems of narrative
and memory: to try to ascertain when a recollection of a series of events
crosses the line from mere description to something greater.
— Ben Greenman
Next: Day Four
Previous: Day Two
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