Woodcutters

By the time her talk was over, she had traced her lineage of influence and admiration to some fifteen writers from Russell Edson to Proust. What had begun as a shop-talk about one writer’s beginnings had become a pageant, an exemplum of literary activity —a profession. The writer who had started with translations of Leiris and Blanchot and with some idiosyncratic short short stories had turned into the translator of Swann’s Way and the author of a novel and four volumes of stories—148 stories—republished in a collected edition of 730 pages. She’d gone from bonsai to forest management. —Richard Locke on Lydia Davis, Threepenny Review

(via Quilty)