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 – Sherlock Holmes: A Flash In The Pan – William Meikle (Independently published)

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

4 – Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone – Thiahera Nurse and Reginald Gibbons (Northwestern University Press, 2019)

5 – The Maze To My Heart – Alexis M Romo (Alexis Monique Romo, 2020)

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

7 – Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Bad Can Ever Happen Here – Michael Wehunt, Luke Spooner (Nightscape Press, 2020)

8 – Dark Astral: Grim & Perilous Chapbook – Daniel D Fox (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2020)

9 – Maybe, someday – Becca Noel (Independently published, 2020)

10 – Dogs Day – Adam Galliano (Independently published, 2020)