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Marguerite Duras's The Malady of Death, Lydia Davis's The End of the Story, and Maggie Nelson's Bluets all address the grief and misery of sexual relation, or, perhaps more accurately, nonrelation. Duras's récit provides a means of approaching the complex questions surrounding the failure of relation, and the writing of that failure, that I think interest Davis and Nelson. The Malady of Death can provide an introduction to the notion of impossible relation and the way a confrontation with that impossibility might open onto a different kind of relation—one that both escapes writing and is enacted by it. Nelson's Bluets begins as a meditation on her love for the color blue and soon reveals itself as a work that also examines the nature of loss and the difficulty of knowing and loving another person. Lastly, Davis, in The End of the Story, focuses on the way we narrate the loss of relation, sometimes before it has even happened, as a means of trying to makes sense of something that probably always eludes our grasp.

An interview with writer Lydia Davis is presented. Among other things, Davis talks about today's literary culture and her stories.

What would Wittgensteinian fiction—not overtly about or influenced by him, but that resonates with his thought—look like? Lydia Davis has avowed, but never explained, her admiration for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her short and fragmentary fictions are attuned to how grammar and usage reveal our forms of life. Alongside briefer discussion of Adam Ehrlich Sachs and other contemporary American writers, I characterize both Wittgenstein and Davis as uncanny grammarians: though we live in language, we are never fully at home in it. Both press on our ordinary language in an extraordinary way, defamiliarizing the familiar to more explicitly understand it.

Scholarship has established the difficulty of expressing the seemingly inexpressible experience of traumatic loss. Nevertheless, there are texts that enable expression despite this difficulty. They endow expansive, elusive concepts of loss with worthy articulation. Putting trauma theory in conversation with ordinary language philosophy illuminates how such moments become conceivable. Examples from a literary tradition that stretches from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett to Lydia Davis construct a potent and a public space for this work. Literature is therefore able to create new forms of utterance from which ordinary meaning gains a purchase on the extra-ordinary.

A short story is presented.

This paper focuses on how contemporary literary works by women authors in China and the U.S. reverse the individualist West/collectivist China assumption. It mainly compares the works of Lydia Davis and Wang Anyi with regards to urban women's identities. Under the inspiration of revolutionary ideologies that characterize 20th century China, female characters are striving for meaning in their lives as individuals. In U.S.-American writings, however, the individual is becoming more anonymous and interchangeable, particularly in urban spaces. This article traces possible reasons and implications for this contrast.

A short story is presented.

A short story is presented.

A short story is presented.