Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis’s first collection of essays came out in 2019. Her second, on translation, foreign languages and the city of Arles, will be published later this year.

One French City

Lydia Davis, 12 August 2021

There is a short street near the place de la République called the rue des Carmes. It has a dog-leg bend in it, and just at the bend is the doorway of a bookshop specialising in small-press poetry books. You learn that when you walk down this street, south from the rue de la République, which is at your back, you are walking down the centre of what used to be the nave of a large church, the Church of the Carmelites.

Story: ‘Dear Who Gives a C**p’

Lydia Davis, 7 January 2021

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...

It seems, in the end, that an obsession with words, their proper order and their etymologies, is nothing less than a search for proof that time existed. 

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