Lydia Davis

An Interview with Lydia Davis

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ELEANOR WACHTEL

Brick 81
Posted on June 1, 2008 

From her mysterious “found” stories to new versions of Proust and Flaubert, the American writer and translator Lydia Davis is surprising and memorable. I find it hard to describe exactly what Lydia Davis’s writing is like. Some of her shorter pieces read like poems and, in fact, she has had work in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry. When she won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award a few years ago, they called her work “literary miniatures” and praised how they reveal “how all that one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest.”

An Interview with Anne Carson

An Interview with Anne Carson

Eleanor Wachtel

Brick 89

Posted on June 10, 2014

I’ve admired Canadian poet, essayist, Greek and Latin scholar, and librettist, Anne Carson for a long time now. I think I first heard about her as a professor of classics at McGill University who was writing amazing stuff, starting with her quirky academic treatise, Eros the Bittersweet, where she mixes classical philosophy with witty, ironic brilliance.

Next she produced two remarkable books of poetry combined with essays. She was hailed as an original by Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, and Annie Dillard. She won both a Guggenheim and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the MacArthur “genius” award. With her 2001 book, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, she became the first woman to receive England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. It also took Canada’s Griffin Prize. Along the way, she had a crossover success with another unusual book, Autobiography of Red, subtitled “A Novel in Verse.” It blends a modern homosexual romance with Greek myth, set in small-town Ontario and Peru. See what I mean?