Another local independent bookstore is Pulp Fiction. Located in the triangle that is Main, Kingsway and Broadway, Pulp Fiction began with used books (and vinyl records), but over the years has made space for new titles, three of which I purchased last week – Alain Badiou’s Five Lessons On Wagner, Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes and The Collected Short Stories Of Lydia Davis. I bought these books with the intention of giving them as gifts, but as I had not yet read all of Davis’s stories, I kept her Collected for myself.

Davis is associated with contemporary United States literary vanguardism, and as such writes a lot about middle class relationships, most notably between a first-person woman and the men in her life. In reading Davis’s book I could not help but wonder had Ingeborg Bachmann lived longer than her 47 years, would she be writing similarly?

Here is a paragraph from Davis’s “Cockroaches In Autumn”:

After a week, I take a forgotten piece of bread from the oven where they have visited – now it is dry, a bit of brown lace.