A woman from Barnard College calls me and in the course of our phone conversation she asks me if I would please spell ‘hemorrhaging’ for her. I spell it, but wrong – maybe ‘hemmhoraging’.
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‘A woman from Barnard College calls me and asks if I would please spell ‘hemorrhaging’ for her.’
A woman from Barnard College calls me and in the course of our phone conversation she asks me if I would please spell ‘hemorrhaging’ for her. I spell it, but wrong – maybe ‘hemmhoraging’.
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Lydia Davis is the author of seven collections of stories, one novel and two books of non-fiction, Essays One and Essays Two. She is also the translator of a number of works from French and other languages, including Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. A new collection of short fiction, Our Strangers, will be appearing this autumn from Bookshop Editions and Canongate. In honour of her literary achievements, she was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
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‘gormandizing, gluttonous, lickerish, guttling’
Excerpts from Lydia Davis’s diary.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
‘My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother’.
‘When and where does the crisis of war begin and end?’
Y-Dang Troeung on the longevity of war.
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