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Lydia Davis: two stories



Appropriate Punctuation


One should really, at the very least, when writing about the ancient, august, and storied university town of Oxford, England, employ the Oxford comma.


*****


Advice to Herself as Young Writer, Many Years Ago


You must let your imagination go if you want these small stories to occur to you.

And they must always arise from a burst of exuberance.


You must say to yourself, "Be exuberant!"



An acclaimed translator, Lydia Davis is also the author of story collections including The Collected Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) and Can't and Won't (FSG,2014), as well as one novel, The End of the Story (FSG, 1995). Her most recent book is Essays (FSG, 2019). A second book of essays, on translation, foreign languages, and the city of Arles, will be forthcoming in 2021. She was named a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translations, received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2003), and won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit medal and the Man Booker International Prize (both 2013).

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