fwriction

Today’s Story of the Day is actually an “excerpt,” courtesy of NPR, from Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories. “The Old Dictionary” is one of my favorite all-time short stories, and it showcases why Davis is a master of “flash fiction” (as does “Losing Memory,” another story featured in this excerpt: it comes in at a cool twelve words). Enjoy this, and do yourself a favor: read as much Lydia Davis as possible.

“I have an old dictionary, about one hundred and twenty years old, that I need to use for a particular piece of work I’m doing this year. Its pages are brownish in the margins and brittle, and very large. I risk tearing them when I turn them. When I open the dictionary I also risk tearing the spine, which is already split more than halfway up. I have to decide, each time I think of consulting it, whether it is worth damaging the book further in order to look up a particular word.”