Essays

From the International Man Booker Prize-winning author of Can't and Won't and The End of the Story - a crystalline collection of literary essays for fans of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion 
 
'She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith 
 
'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!' A. M. Homes 
 
The visionary, fearless Lydia Davis presents a dazzling collection of essays on reading and writing, exploring the full scope of possibility within existing forms of literature and considering how we might challenge and reinvent these forms. 
 
Through Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin, Joan Mitchell and others, he author considers her many creative influences. And, through these lenses, she returns to her own writing process, her relationship to language and the written word. Beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating, these pieces are a masterclass in reading and writing.

Masterful, lucid collection . . . no single piece could capture the essence of this extraordinary writer . . . Read these essays: see everything around you in a clear, fresh light

The beloved American author reflects on reading and writing in typically funny, incisive and tender style

A cornucopia of illuminating and timeless observations on literature, art, and the craft of writing

The unclassifiable writer and translator's collected nonfiction shows us a brilliant mind at work

Davis does for the essay what one of her subjects-Rimbaud-did for the prose poem: fires language with emotive, radiant wisdom

From the winner of the International Man Booker Prize, a crystalline collection of timeless literary essays 
 
The visionary, fearless Lydia Davis presents a dazzling collection of essays on reading and writing, exploring the full scope of possibility within existing forms of literature and considering how we might challenge and reinvent these forms. 
 
Through Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin, Joan Mitchell and others, the author considers her many creative influences. And, through these lenses, she returns to her own writing process, her relationship to language and the written word. Beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating, these pieces are a masterclass in reading and writing. 
 
'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!' A. M. Homes

Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

Lydia Davis's writing is a masterclass in control: wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating as her critically acclaimed short fiction. Ranging across her many creative influences, including Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin and Joan Mitchell, she returns again and again to her own writing process, joyfully interrogating the limits of literature and the ways in which we can challenge and reinvent it.

The End of the Story

The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013. 
 
'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.' 
 
Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction 
 
Back in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel. 
 
'Extraordinary' Newsday 
 
'Brilliant' New Yorker 
 
'Breathtakingly elegant' Details 
 
'Beautifully written' Marie Claire 
 
'Astonishing' Elle 
 
Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

Unputdownable . . . [The End of the Story] freed me from the preconceptions I had then about the way novels were supposed to work . . . it deals with the heat and the thirst of infatuation, the desperation to find an end to the torment when a desired object won't reciprocate

Can't and Won't is the most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years

Lydia Davis's short stories are perfected economies, witty devices, precision-made, primed to release intelligence, philosophy, hilarity. They celebrate the thinking universe while they redefine the possibilities of the form. There is no other writer quite like her

Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. . . one of the best writers in America

Her work is exquisite, finely wrought and devastating. . . Read her now!

Mislabeled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

Can't and Won't

Can't and Won't is the new collection from Lydia Davis, one of the greatest short story writers alive. 
 
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013 
 
Lydia Davis has been universally acclaimed for the wit, insight and genre-defying formal inventiveness of her sparkling stories. 
 
With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', the stories in this new collection illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising. 
 
Above all the stories revel in and grapple with the joys and constraints of language - achieving always the extraordinary, unmatched precision which makes Lydia Davis one of the greatest contemporary writers on the international stage. 
 
Praise for Lydia Davis: 
 
'What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read' Metro 
 
'To read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality' Independent on Sunday 
 
'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!' A. M. Homes 
 
Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

The most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years

Profound, beautiful, moving. You will go back to a little gem that has wormed its way into your mind and stuck there, and discover that it is indeed a little gem, which sparkles a different way each time and flashes with a brief beauty or hidden meaning

Davis hints insistently at how abundant nothingness can be when we bother to look at it

Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!

Can't and Won't shows Davis using precise language to articulate the kind of ideas and impressions which are usually left to float around the subconscious

With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', the stories in this collection illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising. 
 
Above all the stories revel in and grapple with the joys and constraints of language - achieving always the extraordinary, unmatched precision which makes Lydia Davis one of the greatest contemporary writers on the international stage.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis. 
 
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013. 
 
'Big rejoicing: Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize. Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch. Best of all, a new audience will read her now and find her wit, her vigour and rigour, her funniness, her thoughtfulness, and the precision of form, which mark Davis out as unique. 
 
Daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic [she] reminds you, in a world that likes to bandy its words about, what words such as economy, precision and originality really mean. This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust. 
 
A two-liner from Davis, or a seemingly throwaway paragraph, will haunt. What looks like a game will open to deep seriousness; what looks like philosophy will reveal playfulness, tragicomedy, ordinariness; what looks like ordinariness will ask you to look again at Davis's writing. In its acuteness, it always asks attentiveness, and it repays this by opening up to its reader like possibility, or like a bush covered in flowerheads. 
 
She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith 
 
'What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read' Metro 
 
'I loved these stories. They are so well-written, with such clarity of thought and precision of language. Excellent' William Leith, Evening Standard 
 
'Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality' Independent on Sunday 
 
'A body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure and human wisdom' New Yorker 
 
'Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. She can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking, or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical. I felt I had encountered a most original and daring mind' Colm Toibin, Daily Telegraph 
 
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris and Marcel Proust.

Rich, deeply involving, extraordinary, remarkable

I loved these stories. They are so well-written, with such clarity of thought and precision of language. Excellent

Brilliant, exciting, thrilling, extremely funny

'Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read The Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality' Independent on Sunday 
 
Find out why fellow authors like Ali Smith, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen love Lydia Davis's writing so much in this landmark collection of all of her stories to date from across three decades. And why James Wood described this book in the New Yorker as 'a body of work probably unique in American writing' and 'one of the great, strange American literary contributions'.

Lydia Davis

We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional

Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising . . . Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process [of translation]. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader . . . A book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels

[Essays Two is] a guide to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self

When Davis breaks down the work of writing, she can be very funny, often at her own expense . . . The pieces in Essays Two brim with daring experiments . . . There is an element of knight-errantry, quest, romantic fatalism as she pursues the elusive foreign language, and often a distant century

As a translator, Davis is known for fidelity, clarity, and, in the case of Proust, decluttering . . . Yet the collection is not, mostly, about problems with other people’s translations but the process of working on her own – a kind of shop talk we’re allowed to listen in on . . . Davis once said in an interview that she would find it ‘almost morally or ethically wrong’ to deliberately impose her own style on a translation. Her scrupulousness is, perhaps, a counterbalance to the translator’s power, and to the peremptory instinct that prompts translation in the first place

'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust'(Ali Smith) 
 
Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays. Now, she continues the project with Essays Two, focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles. 
 
Every essay in this book is a revelation.

Lydia Davis

Praise for Essays Two

We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional

Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising . . . Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process [of translation]. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting ...

[Essays Two is] a guide to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self

We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional

Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising . . . Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process [of translation]. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting ...

[Essays Two is] a guide to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self

We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional

Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising . . . Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process [of translation]. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting ...

[Essays Two is] a guide to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self

Books by Lydia Davis

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