#essays one

[macrolit]

Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion - you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

Essays One, Lydia Davis

[noosphe-re]

Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human.

Lydia Davis, Essays One

[theoptia]

Lydia Davis from Essays One; “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits”

[virginias-daughter]

I like to understand things and tend to ask questions of myself or another person until there is nothing left that I do not understand. At the time, in the midst of period when I was training myself so hard in another kind of representation and seeing more and more clearly into the subtle workings of my language, I was confronted with this experience of opacity.  ... Eventually I began to find answers to my questions, but they were not complete answers, and after a time I did not feel the need for complete answers, because I saw that part of the force of the painting was that it continued to elude explanation. I became willing to allow aspects of the painting to remain mysterious, and I became willing to allow aspects of other problems to remain unsolved as well, and it was this new tolerance for, and the satisfaction in, the unexplained and unsolved that marked a change in me.

From Essays One by Lydia Davis

[virginias-daughter]

Which is to say that a good poem is bound to offer you something surprising in the way of language and thinking, even if some of its meaning eludes you.

From Essays One by Lydia Davis

[universitybookstore]

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

Lydia Davis.

[universitybookstore]

New from FSG, Essays One, by Lydia David.  The next exciting volume from this American master of contemporary prose. (Read more here.)