Lydia Davis, famed for writing stories as short as a few words, has won this year’s Man Booker International Prize. Adam Sherwin offers some examples of Davis’ works:
Index Entry
Christian, I’m not a
Getting to Know Your Body
If your eyeballs move, this means that you’re thinking, or about to start thinking.
If you don’t want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.
The Outing
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
All taken from The Collected Stores of Lydia Davis, published by Penguin Books.
Judge Christopher Ricks wonders how to categorize her work:
“Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?”
… Davis herself has said that she is happy to stick with “story” as a categorisation for her work. “When I first began writing seriously, I wrote short stories, and that was where I thought I was headed. Then the stories evolved and changed, but it would have become a bother to say every time, ‘I guess what I have just written is a prose poem, or a meditation’, and I would have felt very constrained by trying to label each individual work, so it was simply easier to call everything stories,” she told the Observer in 2010.
And “even if the thing is only a line or two, there is always a little fragment of narrative in there, or the reader can turn away and imagine a larger narrative,” she said.
A recent profile provides further insight into her logic:
When she was asked her why she writes “short fiction” she invoked the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and his homage to Zukofsky, the point being that the title of his poem is three words and the poem itself is only one word, “the.”
The Dish 