Lydia Davis interview

In the Observer,William Skidelsky interviews Lydia Davis, who is famous for writing stories that are sometimes one-sentence long.

"I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating Swann's Way. There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn't make me recoil exactly – I loved working on it – but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke."