The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her. 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. 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.

Lydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. 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. . . . Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.” In 2013 She was the winner of the Man Booker International prize.

1 – The Cows – Lydia Davis (Sarabande Books, 2011)

2 – Mare Nostrum – Khaled Mattawa (Sarabande Books, 2019)

3 – On Imagination – Mary Ruefle (Sarabande Books, July 2017)

4 – Earth Songs – Mark B. Hamilton  (Panhandler Press, University of West Florida, 2020)

5 – The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named: Poems – Nicole Sealey (Northwestern University Press, 2016)

6 – Purity of Aim: The Book Jacket Designs of Alvin Lustig – Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger (RIT Press, 2010)

7 – Puro Amor  – Sandra Cisneros (Sarabande Books, 2018)

8 – Murder! – A.M. Juster, Noam D. Plum, Chris O’Carroll, Marilyn L. Taylor, Marcus Bales, Vera Ignatowitsch, Frank Hubeny, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, Robin Helweg-Larsen, Michael R. Burch (Sampson Low, 2020)

9 – Curse of the Flying Dutchman -Noah Patterson (Independently published, 2020)

10 – A World More Real Than Ours – Faeza Shahan (Independently published, 2020)