Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very pleased to be talking to Lydia Davis.

She's a writer I've spoken to before.

Her newest book of short pieces is called Varieties of Disturbance,

and it's published by Farras Strauss and Giroux.

Her most recent book, Samuel Johnson is Indignant,

was published by McSweeney's as now a paperback edition.

She's the author as well of Almost No Memory, Break It Down,

A novel, The End of the Story. She has been

the admired translator of the first volume of memories of things past. She did Swan's Way.

And I wanted to begin by asking you, these pieces, now people are saying that you're

inventing a new kind of short story, but they seem to be part of a process of writing

about life itself, almost on a daily basis. How did they begin? Do you mean the paragraph

long pieces, the short pieces? Yes. Then there are the very, very short ones that are just a

sentence and a title. The way they began, I guess I started out in the very beginning,

thinking that the only kind of story you could write

was a conventional narrative, short story,

...