The Picador Book Room

Luminous Airplanes
Fly By Wire
The City of Your Final Destination

I put that word on the page, 
but he added the apostrophe.

“Collaboration with Fly” / The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis,p. 508 (Picador 2010)

Find more excerpts from The Collected Stories on NPR, check out a new story from Lydia at The Telegraph, and read an interview from 2008 at The Believer.

BLVR: Flash fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts, very shorts, prose poems, proems—do you think the solution to sorting the chaos is to create more categories?

LD: Where a need is felt for another category, I think it will be created and accepted, although that may take time. There is some acceptance of the terms flash fiction, sudden fiction,etc. But I think people may still be expecting a kind of miniature short story when they begin reading a piece of flash fiction, rather than the less usual offering that it might be—meditation, logic game, extended wordplay, diatribe—for which there is no good general name. Robert Walser was described by one critic (rather diminishingly, I think) as a “feuilletonist.” He sometimes referred to his work simply as “short prose pieces.”