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:
We will add to these links as the week goes on. - - - - Read endorsements from: We'd love you to add your thoughts about Lydia Davis's work. Keep them relatively brief — under 500 words — and we'll continue to post them. Send them to davisbook@mcsweeneys.net.
I was browsing the shelves of a used bookstore in Dallas. My eyes were weary. Almost No Memory sat forward from the rest of the books on the shelf. I tucked it up under my arm and went home. I ran around my children who ran around me and between my legs. My wife laughed. Later, after baths and the nightly news, I took the book with me to bed. After the first story I read I did not exclaim holy mackerel. But I read another. And another. I was enthralled. I stayed up late. I turned the pages and stayed up very late. In the morning, I wasn't tired at all. — David Gianadda - - - - Thank you for Samuel Johnson is Indignant. I'm happy to see that Lydia Davis will be visiting Boston soon. I doubt you need any more praise for her work but here is a short comment: Lydia Davis's stories illuminate the familiar, squalid, and obscure agitations of life with a logic sensitive to human frailty. She offers us an unflinchingly candid, sympathetically humorous, virtuosic performance of language as a beautiful, provocative and revelatory reflection of life. Thanks for all the great writing you are cultivating and producing. — Susan Yeon - - - - Forgive me for using art to talk about literature, but Lydia Davis reminds me of Ed Ruscha's work at the Venice Bienalle, 1970. Ruscha silk-screened sheets of white paper with chocolate and covered the inside of the American Pavilion with them. So art tourists and Venetians walked into an empty room lined with chocolate one millimeter thick. It was as if to say: Here is something you want. You can see it, you can smell it, you can touch it. But you can't have it. This is how Lydia Davis sidles up to truth. You are aware of it but you can't know it, can't possess it. It is a mystery, slippery, elusive. Back at the Bienalle, people began to lick their fingers and finger-paint anti-war slogans into the thin chocolate. Later, Venetian ants crawled all over it, creating patterns that looked like lace. In a Lydia Davis story both acts would carry the same weight. And the ants' paths wouldn't be symbols of anything. And the anti-war messages would just be simple, blunt words written in chocolate. But after you read them you would know they were part of something greater. — Catherine Corman - - - - I first encountered Lydia Davis's work while attending grad school in fiction writing at Columbia University. My classmates and I in the workshop led by Stephen Koch were all struggling with the rules - you know, plot, character, dialogue, syntax, etc., basically, the whole issue of language and how to use it - and so finding Davis was an absolute revelation. I introduced Break It Down to everyone in the workshop. Reading Davis's work will open your eyes to the possibility of things you have never thought possible. Her short pieces are so free. Each of her stories is an illustration of freedom. — Allen Pearl - - - - In September 1988, during freshman-orientation week at Kenyon College, I browsed through a copy of Lydia Davis's Break It Down. Two years later, when I was looking for something to read, I found a copy on a table of remaindered books at the Kenyon bookstore. In 1991, around the time of the Gulf War, I found a softbound copy at a used bookstore near the Pike Place Market, in Seattle. The plots of my favorite Lydia Davis stories trace paths of thought. One idea leads to the next. One dilemma leads to a fork in the road, and the narrator examines both forks, as well as each subsequent fork along those two paths. The narrators of these stories are in the same position as the reader: temporarily alone and using language to understand the world. A person can spend hours in solitude then join a dozen friends for the evening then spend more hours alone. While other American fiction captures the social moments of our lives, Lydia Davis's extraordinary stories capture the intricacies of these moments of temporary solitude, the reflective moments when we're half an hour or months away from meeting with our close friends. — Eric Ziegenhagen
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