Lydia Davis is a miniaturist with sizable intentions. Her micro-stories, many just a couple of lines, are constrained in length only; their subject matter might be anything that takes her interest, whether a builder up his ladder, a moment of marital disharmony, a tin of ham or the inevitable approach of death.
Her fans are legion – among them Ali Smith, Colm Tóibín and Dave Eggers – and she has won many honours, including the International Booker prize a decade ago and being awarded a MacArthur fellowship, often referred to as a “the genius grant”, in 2003. Her impressive back catalogue – several story collections and a single novel, The End of the Story – extends beyond her fiction to two widely praised books of essays and a whole other life as a translator of Proust, Flaubert and the Dutch writer AL Snijders.
Her new collection, Our Strangers, consists of 144 short stories, ranging from the extremely diminutive, a mere couple of lines detailing some deceptively commonplace incident or realisation, to extravagances such as the 21-page Winter Letter, in which a woman recounts the events of a weather-battered trip to Texas in a letter to her children. With titles such as Interesting Personal Vegetables, Worrying About Father’s Arm and A Person Asked Me About Lichens, the reader is quickly aware that they are in the land of the offbeat, the strangely comic. Sometimes the titles are longer than the stories themselves, as in Mature Woman Toward the End of a Discussion About Raincoats Over Lunch With Another Mature Woman, whose two lines read simply: “She says, in a reasonable tone, / ‘It doesn’t have to be a Burberry!’”
You should buy Our Strangers. But you will not be able to buy it from Amazon. An introductory note explains that it will be available only from physical booksellers and selected online sites, adding that “Davis is deeply concerned about monopolistic bookselling, and hopes this decision will both stand as a sign of her solidarity with independent booksellers and encourage further conversation about the vital importance of a diverse publishing ecosystem”.
Although she is not the first or only writer to boycott Amazon – Eggers, for example, did it in 2021 – her stance is in keeping with many of the guiding principles of her career to date. The credits to this collection reveal her preference for publishing her work first in small magazines, and despite the critical acclaim that she has received and the attention that followed when she won the Man Booker International prize, she has remained under the radar of mainstream cultural life.
“I’m not worried about fame and glory,” Davis, who is 76, tells me over Zoom from her home in rural upstate New York, “like I’ll only publish in the best known or the best paying. That may have started way back because I remember, in the early 80s, I had creative writing students who would start magazines, and they would ask me for work. And I realised then that I could submit to them wildly inventive and unusual pieces that, say, the New Yorker, even now, would never consider.”
Nonetheless, the decision to remove yourself from the biggest global marketplace in history can’t be one that any writer takes lightly. How did it happen? “I had to drum up quite a bit of determination … I didn’t even tell [my agent] what I was resolving for quite a long time – because it would affect her too, very much. And I had to counter arguments. A close friend said: ‘Well, you know, Amazon makes the book available at a very low price to people who may not be able to afford the full price.’ But I would keep coming back to the idea that I didn’t want to support a business like that. So it was really very heartfelt and deep.”
She adds that her agent was “fully on board”, but is also keen to emphasise that she doesn’t want to seem self-righteous, and that she is sympathetic to writers at the beginning of their careers who are propelled by the desire to get their work in front of readers. Davis no longer travels by plane, and she doesn’t eat meat or bank with institutions that invest in fossil fuels. I ask her whether she feels that individual action can have enough of an impact. “We’ve known about this climate emergency coming for about 50 years,” she says. “And I just wish that everybody would go on strike. If we all went on strike, then no individual worker would suffer.”
When she’s not writing, much of her energy goes towards the activities of the climate committee in her village, and on their current project to build a bird- and pollinator-friendly park on what was once a patch of asphalt. We talk for some time about the virtue of weeds and about her newly ignited interest in soil cultures. “You realise things about yourself gradually over time,” she says, “and I’ve finally realised that I like learning things.”
She’s not kidding: she taught herself Norwegian by reading a single novel – a book she refers to as “the Telemark novel” by Dag Solstad – over and over again, which she describes as “a terrific adventure” that led her to believe that “language teaching the way it’s done is really, really wrong in schools, a terrible waste of everybody’s time”.
Children, she insists, like to figure things out for themselves, and she certainly did. At a young age, as part of a family move, she found herself in an Austrian classroom, having to sink or swim. For her, the experience heralded not cultural dislocation but an immense broadening of horizons, which became even more capacious when she lived in France in the 1970s with her first husband, Paul Auster. Despite the fact that she had known writing was “her fate” since childhood, it was here “I got very dedicated in a way that is painful for me to think about now. The urgency of, ‘I’ve got to try to write this story, I’ve got to do it.’ Why couldn’t I have enjoyed Paris, just walked around and absorbed it? Why did I have to keep staying at that desk?”
Her marriage to Auster was brief; the couple had one son, Daniel, who died last year from a drug overdose after he had been released on bail following the death of his 10-month-old daughter, who had been in his care. She and her second husband, the abstract painter Alan Cote, have another adult son, Theo, who is credited with taking his mother’s author photograph. It is striking that the stories in Our Strangers, which include humorous letters of complaint to corporations and a series detailing trivial domestic annoyances, also feature plangent explorations of the relationships between parents and their children. “I’d sacrifice my right arm to see him well and happy,” goes a three-line piece entitled A Mother’s Devotion. “Well, maybe not my right arm. But certainly my left.”
Davis’s brilliance lies in distillation. She tells me about writing the story Up So Late, in which a woman reading a book late at night realises she is being kept company by a tiny bug. It is a mere six lines, but it conjures an entire world, of solitude briefly and comfortingly interrupted, of a possibly illusory sense of communication between species, of a moment of connection. Even these apparently slight pieces, she tells me, undergo lengthy processes of revision and calibration to find exactly the right word, the right rhythm. “I did that story over and over and over again, so many versions, and separating the little stanzas differently. And I called it an insect first and then preferred the word bug. And, you know, it’s almost ridiculous. And yet it isn’t ridiculous. I wanted to get it exactly right.”
I wonder what, with the climate committee making so many demands on her time, she might be up to next. There are two projects, she replies. One is something – “definitely not fiction” – about a 14th-century monk who underwent the Spanish Inquisition; the other about “a couple of ancestors of mine”. They were a sea captain and his wife, who lived near Boston in the mid-19th century. He was “a man of great feeling who would go out on deck to look at the full moon and call the first mate to come look, not your cliche” – and she was a writer of fiction for newspapers, who, her husband would admit ruefully, earned more than he did. “I have a lot of her stories,” says Davis. “You know, they’re not exactly my cup of tea, but … that’s an interesting couple.”
You can imagine them, wittily and elegantly refashioned in one of Davis’s miniatures, preserved for posterity by their idiosyncratic and virtuosic descendant.
