Over at Electric Literature, John Freeman shares his experiences working as an editor with Lydia Davis and investigates what makes Davis “such a tremendous writer on love”:
Her stories tighten and tighten around the narrator’s assumptions and build a kind of pressure is an effect that illuminates many altered states. Moreover, what Davis was good at wasn’t just laying bare the bad bargains of the heart, but the way the mind was often its chief arbiter, its coconspirator, the mortgage agent working the numbers, making the purchase possible especially when it was ill-advised. What she was wasn’t a love junkie, but one of the greatest descriptive writers of consciousness in the last few decades.
