New Voice

Fiction and Reflection – Part 2

by David O’Connor

     There is great attention to detail in many of the shortest stories.  Often only a paragraph or a page or two in length, these offer meditations on the minutiae of daily life, slowing down lived experience, framing and isolating aspects of that experience.  This technique may be elucidated, perhaps, by looking at “The Mice”, in which the domestic scavengers of the title are unable to find food in the dirty kitchen as there is “something so out of proportion to their experience that they cannot deal with it.”  The mice are overwhelmed by overabundance, incapable of taking it all in, of finding their way amidst such plenitude, just as we cannot process all that surrounds us, the unassimilable superfluity of sensual, emotional and cultural material to which we are (over-) exposed.  (continue reading…)

Fiction and Reflection: Part 1

 by David O’Connor

Lydia Davis had been writing stories for magazines, periodicals and small presses since the mid 1970s when her first book for a major publishing house came out in 1986.  Break it Down comprised of new and less recent stories, and introduced a wider readership (in the USA anyway) to the style she would develop further in subsequent collections: Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and Varieties of Disturbance.  Ranging in length from a single line, through paragraph-long meditations, to 20-30 page narratives, these stories, as Dave Eggers put it, in McSweeney’s, “straddle a line between philosophy, poetry and fiction”, rendering such categories “meaningless because her stories just work.”  (continue reading…)