The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Quotes from the Book
Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.
What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him with be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.
But at other times, I sit here reading in the afternoon, a myrtle in my buttonhole, and there are such beautiful passages in the book that I think I have become beautiful myself.
Idea For A Short Documentary Film Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.
She found it an interesting exercise to explore a place with a person she did not know well, following not only her own impulses but also his.
No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.
I looked at whale jawbones in the museum this morning. Then I did some shopping. Whenever I go into the drugstore it seems that many people are buying condoms and motion sickness medicine.
First they burned her - that was last month. Actually just two weeks ago. Now they're starvng him. When he's dead, they'll burn him too. Oh, how jolly. All this burning of family members in the summertime.
It is not what you want to be doing. It is that you are passing the time. You are waiting until it is a certain hour and you are in a certain condition so that you can go to sleep.
Before I knew my dear Milena, I thought life itself was unbearable. Then she came into my life and showed me that that was not so. True, our first meeting was not auspicious, for her mother answered the door, and what a strong forehead the woman had, with an inscription on it which read: "I am dead, and I despise anyone who is not." Milena seemed pleased that I had come, but much more pleased when I left. That day, I happened to look at a map of the city. For a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone would build a whole city when all that is needed was a room for her.
Watch on YouTube
About Lydia Davis
More by Lydia Davis
About the book
Lydia Davis has been called "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times), "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon), an innovator who attempts "to remake the model of the modern short story" (The New York Times Book Review). Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are "moving . . . and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking."
In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the
Book details
- First published
- 2007
- Author
- Lydia Davis
- Genre
- Fiction
- Goodreads rating
- 3.81 (2k ratings)
The buzz
- The New York TimesReview in The New York Timesprofessional review (via Book Marks)
- Kirkus ReviewsReview in Kirkus Reviewsprofessional review (via Book Marks)
- Publishers WeeklyReview in Publishers Weeklyprofessional review (via Book Marks)
- BookforumReview in Bookforumprofessional review (via Book Marks)
- ArticlesReview in Articlesprofessional review (via Book Marks)
- SfgateReview in Sfgateprofessional review (via Book Marks)
Keep reading
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
The Folded Clock: A Diary
The Color Master: Stories
Mr. Fox
Bluebeard's Egg
Too Much Happiness: Stories
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
Old Babes in the Wood: Stories
Range of Motion
Dept. of Speculation
Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002
The Moonstone
The Collected Stories
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
How We Are Hungry
What Comes Next and How to Like It
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Belong to Me
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
The Woman in the Library
Girl with Curious Hair
The Book of Love
Burnt Sugar
Inferno
Hot Milk
The Chimes
The Library of the Dead
Bright Lights, Big City
Em and The Big Hoom
The Wednesday Wars
Glass, Irony and God
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Checkout 19
Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
Rosewater
The Illustrated Man
Sea of Silver Light
Palimpsest
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Golden Apples of the Sun
The Art of Inheriting Secrets
Liberation Day
Where Things Come Back
Still Life
Good Bones and Simple Murders
Out Stealing Horses
The Raw Shark Texts
The Reader
Journal of a Solitude
Pastoralia
The Gun Seller
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
Lisey's Story
The Sentence
Walk Two Moons
Seasparrow
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

