Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Cows
    The Cows
    The Cows
    Ebook36 pages15 minutes

    The Cows

    By Lydia Davis

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Winner of the Man Booker International Prize

    "You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.

    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.

    Forms of play: head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you; circling each other; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.

    She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSarabande Books
    Release dateSep 7, 2012
    ISBN9781936747610
    The Cows
    Author

    Lydia Davis

    Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, art, memory, and the Bible. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can’t and Won’t (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as “a grand cumulative achievement.” Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

    Read more from Lydia Davis

    Related to The Cows

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Jenny Offill Exerts Herself

      Jan 15, 2020

      I don’t love the language that’s available to talk about this stuff. If you’re not drawn to earnestness, how do you make yourself a more engaged person? The post Jenny Offill Exerts Herself appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Summer Party

      Jun 8, 2021

      Rosemary looked over the party; her parents and her parents’ friends down below on the sod lawn. Seersucker and espadrilles; white cotton dresses; Brazilian jazz; the costumes of their heyday. They drank beer and Long Island iced tea and white wine p

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Freshening

      Sep 15, 2018

      My cashier’s black hair was beautiful. Though not unlike mine, it was shinier and thicker, and hung glamorously down to her waist. It looked strong, too, like Christopher Reeve’s in the Superman movies. A strand of Superman’s silvery hair could hold

      21 min read

    • Article

      On Louise Glück

      Dec 1, 2021

      I WAS LYING in bed late at night, woeful, confused by another death, this one the death of a close friend; the losses had been mounting steadily, a bewildering number of losses, each one specific, difficult to accept, hard to overcome, and I must hav

      12 min read

    • Article

      What Poetry Can Predict

      Oct 9, 2019

      What Poetry Can Predict
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Mirror Test

      Dec 1, 2020

      always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; butwhat if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?;you mean to say that after all you are really goingto be the kind of woman who the baker won’t letnear the bread? —Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” In the eighteen

      19 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 254

      Jun 14, 2022

      The Art of Fiction No. 254
      33 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      Mannered, Pretty 'Upstate' Is Quiet To A Fault

      Jun 7, 2018

      Critic and novelist James Wood has often dinged other writers for what he calls "hysterical realism," but his new novel Upstate — while beautifully written — goes too far in the other direction.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Every Hair Casts a Shadow

      Sep 12, 2023

      “They didn’t even choose an interesting battle to commemorate,” Víctor said. “My God, who cares about sinking some British merchant ships—it’s not like it helped them win the war.” He’d removed the lid from the jar of candies we offer to children who

      20 min read

    • Article

      I Don’t Trust Images: The Millions Interviews Ottessa Moshfegh

      Dec 27, 2018

      My approach to writing was like a little volatile. Sort of like “fuck you," what drove a lot of my creativity—not all the time, but I can identify that. The post I Don’t Trust Images: The Millions Interviews Ottessa Moshfegh appeared first on The Mil

      11 min read

    • Article

      Another Person’s Words: Poetry Is Always the Speaker

      Jul 16, 2019

      More than rhyme and meter, or any other formal aspect, what defines poetry is its self-awareness. Poetry is the language which knows that it’s language. The post Another Person’s Words: Poetry Is Always the Speaker appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Prophet of Nothingness

      Sep 12, 2021

      The Prophet of Nothingness
      9 min read

    • Article

      David Berman, Slacker God

      Aug 8, 2019

      David Berman, Slacker God
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Love Lost, Then Inexplicably Found

      Mar 28, 2022

      Our Wives Under the Sea is an arresting novel that moves quietly. Told from the alternating perspectives of Miri and her wife Leah, the story revolves around the mysterious after-effects of an undersea research mission gone awry. Julia Armfield seaml

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Cows

    3.5/5

    14 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Another absolutely precise exercise in writing and observation, this time on an intentionally undramatic subject, three cows across the street from Davis's house. For me, the interest is in observing the faint ghosts of other kinds of writing hovering around the nearly clean skeletons of her descriptions. A touch of surrealism, of anima rights, of detective stories, of transcendentalism... no paragraph is pure in the sense that a haiku can appear pure. (Appear, not be.)I am not as happy with the pictures, simply because they are too loosely correlated with the text. Why can't a writer as exacting as Davis demand the same of her images? On a page where the prose insists that she sees the cows only from a great distance and through a restricted angle of view, we get a photo of cows taken from the edge of their pasture. The difference is not made into a theme, either in the text (which doesn't acknowledge the viewpoint of the photos), or in the photos (which shift without rhyme or reason from telephoto to close-up). It makes images seem weak: it appears it's not right to request too much of them. I think the opposite.
    • 4/5
      Too short.
      Of course.
      ************
      (okay, that was a bit of a cop-out. I love short books and short reviews.)
      I liked that she just captured the serenity of cow-gazing. Gazing at cows, being gazed at by cows.
      It is all very in the moment, "mindfulness" I think is the current term. It was a literary equivalent of a prescriptive nature exposure -- being out 'in nature', such as a park etc., for even just a few minutes a day, is good for the mental health.
      It was a good and restful piece to read at lunchtime in the office.
      It reminds one that just zoning out and enjoying our surroundings is something to do more often.

    Book preview

    The Cows - Lydia Davis

    001001

    Table of Contents

    Also by Lydia Davis

    Title Page

    Copyright Page

    Also by Lydia Davis

    NOVEL

    The End of the Story

    STORIES

    Break It Down

    Almost No Memory

    Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

    Varieties of Disturbance

    The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

    SELECTED TRANSLATIONS

    Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

    Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

    Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot

    The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot

    Rules of the Game, I: Scratches by Michel Leiris

    Rules of the Game, II: Scraps by Michel Leiris

    Hélène by Pierre-Jean Jouve

    EACH NEW DAY, when they come out from the far side of the barn, it is like the next act, or the start of an entirely new play.

    They amble out from the far side of the barn with their rhythmic, graceful walk, and it is an occasion, like the start of a parade.

    Sometimes the second and third come out in stately procession while the first has stopped and stands still, staring.

    004005
    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1