In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. Lydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back.

It could be compared to some sections of Wallace Stevens' 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' or to Claude Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.įorms of play: head butting mounting, either at the back or at the front trotting away by yourself trotting together going off bucking and prancing by yourself resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you circling each other taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it. The piece, written with understated humor and empathy, is a series of detailed observations of the cows on different days and in different positions, moods, and times of the day. The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her.

Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. 'You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity,' says The Village Voice.

The Cows by Lydia Davis