L Y D I A D A V I S
W E E K :
D A Y F O U R .
- - - -
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.
This week, we'll be featuring testimonials from writers and readers about Lydia's work, along with excerpts from the new book, and reviews past and present. There are also these new links, with more to come:
- A brief biography of Lydia Davis
- Early praise for Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
- A small roundup of past praise for Lydia Davis
- Lydia's homepage at PreviewPort
- An interview with Lydia on Salon
- A nice article about Lydia winning the Insigna of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government for her translation work
- Tour dates for Lydia
We will add to these links as the week goes on.
- - - -
Read endorsements from:
Rick Moody
Heidi Julavits
Christopher Kennedy
Ben Greenman
Dave Eggers
Due to many requests from readers of this site, we planned to devote much of today's space to reprinting a selection of Lydia Davis's stories, giving you more of a peek at the contents of Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.
But before we do, we'd first like to give you a few words from Amy Fusselman, author of The Pharmacist's Mate, which pick up where we left off yesterday, urging you to attend one of Lydia's upcoming East Coast readings.
"Lydia Davis is ferocious. When I attended her reading in NYC recently, and heard her read the piece about the old dictionary and her son, I was struck again by how that piece is one of the most fearless bits of writing I've ever read. It was all the more powerful to hear her read it in her own, soft voice." — Amy Fusselman
And we also have to bring attention to today's excellent review in The Village Voice written by Michael Miller. If you don't have time to jump over to the Voice site, here are a few key passages:
"In her latest collection of stories, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, Davis continues to match her gift for clarity with an unruly inquisitiveness that transforms mundane topics into hilariously meticulous philosophical moments. A few of the stories explore surreal, almost mythical terrain, where women turn into trees and bloodless creatures raid a narrator's garden. But the best stories here, most of them in the first person, present odd intricacies of small-town domestic lives, isolating everyday moments and relentlessly teasing out the implications
"Samuel's stories present a dizzying amount of information in a relatively short space. Her characters tend to question everything, including themselves, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of her best pieces evoke a sense of hyperanalytical isolation.
""The Furnace" documents a woman's attempts to be affectionate with an aging father who fills his free time reading the crime beat section of his local newspaper and writing editorials on circumcision. In "The Dictionary," a scholar measures her questionable child-rearing against how well she cares for a rare, antique book, and achieves a realization about how she could better treat her young son.
"In these stories, Davis's characters not only offer us new ways to look at the world, but also careful ways to think about other people. Her creations might be selfish, impolite. At first glance, they might not seem like ideal romance material. But they rarely slip entirely into the cheap solipsism found so often in current self-aware fiction. Even as they emphasize that interactions between people are-surprise-hard to predict, they keep an eye on how their choices might affect someone else. In this sense, Davis's attempts to be accurate go beyond the sentence. Her characters are as concerned with the complications of being good as they are with being verbally correct."
And now we'd like to give a glimpse into the book, with a few of our favorite pieces, both related in content and both of the very-short variety, "Boring Friends," and "Interesting."
BORING FRIENDS
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
INTERESTING
My friend is interesting but he is not in his apartment.
Their conversation appears interesting but they are speaking a language I do not understand.
They are both reputed to be interesting people and so I'm sure their conversation is interesting, but they are speaking a language I understand only a little, so I catch only fragments such as "I see" and "on Sunday" and "unfortunately."
This man has a good understanding of his subject and says many things about it that are probably interesting in themselves, but I am not interested because the subject does not interest me.
Here is a woman I know coming up to me. She is very excited, but she is not an interesting woman. What excites her will not be interesting, it will simply not be interesting. .
At a party, a highly nervous man talking fast says many smart things about subjects that do not particularly interest me, such as the restoration of historic houses and in particular the age of wallpaper. Yet, because he is so smart and because he gives me so much information per minute, I do not get tired of listening to him.
Here is a very handsome English traffic engineer. The fact that he is so handsome, and so animated, and has such a fine English accent makes it appear, each time he begins to speak, that he is about to say something interesting, but he is never interesting, and he is saying something, yet again, about traffic patterns.
We'll be back tomorrow with more endorsements.
Next: Day Five
Previous: Day Three
OTHER McSWEENEY'S STORIES:
- - - -
Lydia Davis Week Day Three
Lydia Davis Week Day Two
Lydia Davis Week Introduction
Suspicious Exposure By Steve Featherstone
Days of Awe By Rossi
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.