Lydia Davis Short Stories

1. Lydia Davis is an American writer noted for her short stories. Davis is also a novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages.
3. Born: July 15, 1947 (age 67),Northampton, MA
4. Spouse: Paul Auster (m. 1974–1978)
5. Children: Daniel Auster, Theo Cote
6. Awards: Man Booker International Prize, MacArthur Fellowship

1.      The collected short stories of Lydia Davis, which I have on my Kindle, revealed to me an author of extraordinary gifts. I have never read such a varied selection of styles, length of stories (some very long, some a line or two), points of view, first person narrators, quirky-ness of language--describing her breadth of story-telling ability could go on and on.
2.      How I had lived in the USA for so long and never heard of her is a mystery.
3.      I wish I could cut and paste, from The Daily Telegraph, the whole of Colm Toibin's review of her collected short stories, but the following will give you a taste:
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           "Her vision of suburban America has all the unsettled surrealism of a Gregory Crewdson photograph. Like John Cheever, she can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking, or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical. Her tone, at times, can take its haughty bearings from French novelists such as Nathalie Sarraute, and certainly from Beckett’s prose, or from Proust, whose work she has translated.

           Having read all 733 pages of her book in a few days, I felt I had encountered a most original and daring mind. The ability of her protagonists to self-dramatise is tempered by their wit. Davis’s sly, spiky system of imagining is opened out by tenderness, by sheer pain, by hilarity, often in the same paragraph. Her risky hit and miss system of storytelling is enriched by discipline and by the most surprising twists and turns; her stories display a sensibility of the rarest sort, allowing itself full exposure."