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.
Mitchell S. Jackson : Survival Math
Marlon James : Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Sketchtasy
Alicia Jo Rabins : Fruit Geode
Genevieve Hudson : Pretend We Live Here
Jeffrey Yang : Hey Marfa
Chaya Bhuvaneswar : White Dancing Elephants
Layli Long Soldier : Whereas
Diane Williams: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams
R.O. Kwon : The Incendiaries
Tommy Pico : Junk
Dubravka Ugrešić : Fox & American Fictionary
Anna Moschovakis : Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love
Dao Strom : You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else
Catherine Lacey : Certain American States
Forrest Gander : Be With
Chelsea Hodson : Tonight I’m Someone Else
Molly Crabapple : Brothers of the Gun – A Memoir of the Syrian War
Sheila Heti : Motherhood
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi : Call Me Zebra
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