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Overview
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she’s set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times “one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction.”
“The 56 stories . . . showcase the wordplay and distillation of meaning that have become her stylistic hallmarks, offering up crisp twists on familiar themes. . . . Eclectic and astute, Davis continues to find new ways to tell us the things we need to know.” —Publishers Weekly
“Outsiders, self-doubt, and alienation: all form the bedrock upon which Davis sets up an off-kilter, edgy universe distinctly her own.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Davis should be counted among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Davis deploys her gift for verbal bemusement, annoyance, and high anxiety . . . [and] converts her characters’ complex ruminations into narratives full of insight and pleasure.” —The Village Voice
“If you’re smart, chances are good you’ll read the stories in Lydia Davis’s Samuel Johnson is Indignant.” —Vanity Fair
“Precise and quietly unsettling.” —Detroit Free Press
“Introspective and subversive, ironic and playful, obsessive and funny.” —Salon
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466801011 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 220 |
| File size: | 421 KB |
About the Author
Lydia Davis is the author of the story collections Almost No Memory (Picador, 2001) and Break it Down, and the novel The End of the Story. She has won the Guggenheim, the Lannan Foundation Award, the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award and a Chevalier from the French government.
Read an Excerpt
SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT
STORIES
By Lydia Davis
McSweeney's Books
Copyright © 1976-2001 Lydia Davis.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0970335598
Chapter One
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.
They have moved to the country. The country is nice enough: there are quail sitting in the bushes and frogs peeping in the swamps. But they are uneasy. They quarrel more often. They cry, or she cries and he bows his head. He is pale all the time now. She wakes in a panic at night, hearing him sniffle. She wakes in a panic again, hearing a car go up the driveway. In the morning there is sunlight on their faces but mice are chattering in the walls. He hates the mice. The pump breaks. They replace the pump. They poison the mice. Their neighbor's dog barks. It barks and barks. She could poison the dog.
"We're city people," he says, "and there aren't any nice cities to live in."
In her fantasies about other men, as she grew older, about men other than her husband, she no longer dreamed of sexual intimacy, as she once had, perhaps for revenge, when she was angry, perhaps out of loneliness, when he was angry, but only of an affection and a profound sort of understanding, a holding of hands and a gazing into eyes, often in a public place like a café. She did not know if this change came out of respect for her husband, for she did truly respect him, or out of plain weariness, at the end of the day, or out of a sense of what activity she could expect from herself, even in a fantasy, now that she was a certain age. And when she was particularly tired, she couldn't even manage the affection and the profound understanding, but only the mildest sort of companionship, such as being in the same room alone together, sitting in chairs. And it happened that as she grew older still, and more tired, and then still older, and still more tired, another change occurred and she found that even the mildest sort of companionship, alone together, was now too vigorous to sustain, and her fantasies were limited to a calm sort of friendliness among other friends, the sort she really could have had with any man, with a clear conscience, and did in fact have with many, who were friends of her husband's too, or not, a friendliness that gave her comfort and strength, at night, when the friendships in her waking life were not enough, or had not been enough by the end of the day. And so these fantasies came to be indistinguishable from the reality of her waking life, and should not have been any sort of betrayal at all. Yet because they were fantasies she had alone, at night, they continued to feel like some sort of betrayal, and perhaps, because approached in this spirit of betrayal, as perhaps they had to be, to be any comfort and strength, continued to be, in fact, a sort of betrayal.
THE WHITE TRIBE
We live near a tribe of bloodless white people. Day and night they come to steal things from us. We have put up tall wire fences but they spring over them like gazelles and grin fiendishly up at us where we stand looking out of our windows. They rub the tops of their heads until their thin flaxen hair stands up in tufts, and they strut back and forth over our gravel terrace. While we are watching this performance, others among them have crept into our garden and are furtively taking our roses, stuffing them into bags which hang from their naked shoulders. They are pitifully thin, and as we watch them we become ashamed of our fence. Yet when they go, slipping away like white shadows in the gloom, we grow angry at the devastation they have left among our Heidelbergs and Lady Belpers, and resolve to take more extreme measures against them. It is not always the roses they come for, but sometimes—though the countryside for miles is covered with boulders and shards of stone—they carry away the very rocks from our woods, and walking out in the morning we find the ground pitted with hollows where pale bugs squirm blindly down into the earth.
Excerpted from SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT by Lydia Davis. Copyright © 1976-2001 by Lydia Davis. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Boring Friends | 1 | |
| A Mown Lawn | 2 | |
| City People | 3 | |
| Betrayal | 4 | |
| The White Tribe | 6 | |
| Our Trip | 7 | |
| Special Chair | 12 | |
| Certain Knowledge from Herodotus | 14 | |
| Priority | 15 | |
| The Meeting | 17 | |
| Companion | 21 | |
| Blind Date | 22 | |
| Examples of Remember | 28 | |
| Old Mother and the Grouch | 29 | |
| Samuel Johnson Is Indignant | 44 | |
| New Year's Resolution | 45 | |
| First Grade: Handwriting Practice | 47 | |
| Interesting | 48 | |
| Happiest Moment | 50 | |
| Jury Duty | 51 | |
| A Double Negative | 66 | |
| The Old Dictionary | 67 | |
| Honoring the Subjunctive | 71 | |
| How Difficult | 72 | |
| Losing Memory | 73 | |
| Letter to a Funeral Parlor | 74 | |
| Thyroid Diary | 76 | |
| Information from the North Concerning the Ice | 92 | |
| Murder in Bohemia | 93 | |
| Happy Memories | 94 | |
| They Take Turns Using a Word They Like | 98 | |
| Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman | 99 | |
| Mir the Hessian | 119 | |
| My Neighbors in a Foreign Place | 121 | |
| Oral History (with Hiccups) | 125 | |
| The Patient | 127 | |
| Right and Wrong | 129 | |
| Alvin the Typesetter | 130 | |
| Special | 137 | |
| Selfish | 138 | |
| My Husband and I | 140 | |
| Spring Spleen | 141 | |
| Her Damage | 142 | |
| Working Men | 145 | |
| In a Northern Country | 146 | |
| Away from Home | 167 | |
| Company | 168 | |
| Finances | 170 | |
| The Transformation | 171 | |
| Two Sisters (II) | 173 | |
| The Furnace | 176 | |
| Young and Poor | 192 | |
| The Silence of Mrs. Iln | 193 | |
| Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms | 199 | |
| Money | 200 | |
| Acknowledgement | 201 |