Today’s conversation with Lydia Davis about her latest story collection Our Strangers, a collection of 143 stories, is a deep dive into storytelling. These stories, whether incredibly short or quite long, often eschew backstory, exposition, context or psychological interiority. Sometimes they even comment on other stories within the collection, or revise themselves, becoming something else entirely. Regardless of their length or style, they often raise the questions “is this a story?” and “if it isn’t a story, what is it?” In that spirit, you could consider today’s conversation a deep dive into poetry (syntax and the poetics of the sentence), into nonfiction (the ways autobiographical and found materials are incorporated into her fiction) and into translation as well. And all along the way, we get to hear Lydia read her singular stories of varying shapes and styles.
For the bonus audio archive, Davis contributes a discussion of the work of Swiss writer Peter Bichsel and then reads one of her translations of his stories. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are a wealth of potential benefits and rewards of doing so, including the bonus audio archive. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is today’s BookShop.
The post Lydia Davis : Our Strangers appeared first on Tin House.
Sheila Heti : Motherhood
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi : Call Me Zebra
Jen Bervin : Silk Poems
Cheston Knapp : Up Up Down Down
John Keene : Counternarratives, Playland, and Grind
Vi Khi Nao : Umbilical Hospital & A Brief Alphabet of Torture
Micheline Aharonian Marcom : The Brick House
Terese Marie Mailhot : Heart Berries
Carmen Maria Machado : Her Body and Other Parties
Eunsong Kim : Gospel of Regicide
Leni Zumas : Red Clocks
David Biespiel : The Education of a Young Poet
Rae Armantrout : Partly – New & Selected Poems
Eileen Myles : Afterglow
Celeste Ng : Little Fires Everywhere
Peter Rock : Spells
Safiya Sinclair : Cannibal
Matthew Zapruder : Why Poetry
Yanara Friedland : Uncountry
Mary Ruefle : My Private Property
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