Patio Furniture

The beginning of Lydia Davis’s story, “New Year’s Resolution,” from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

She talked about it with The Paris Review: 

INTERVIEWER

Your reading in Zen Buddhism informs many of your stories—for example, “New Year’s Resolution.”

DAVIS

“My New Year’s resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing.” I had fun with that one because, you know, “nothing,” according to that discipline, is a good thing, but according to my upbringing and Freud and family dynamics, “nothing” is a big problem. So that story is about two disciplines colliding and the poor head caught in the middle saying, Uh, wait a minute . . .

Listen to her read the whole thing here.

Submission Friday:

‘Selfportrait’

by Viktória Bach

Nubes, montaña, olas.