The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis - Hardcover

Davis, Lydia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374270600 ISBN 13: 9780374270605

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2009

Synopsis

Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreakingBreak It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

About this title

Review:

Rich, deeply involving, extraordinary, remarkable (The Times)

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

Brilliant, exciting, thrilling, extremely funny (Daily Telegraph)

Davis is a magician. Few writers working now make the words on the page matter more

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)

About the Author:

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 acclaimed translator of a new edition ofSwann’s Way and is at work on a new translation of Madame Bovary.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0374270600
• ISBN 13: 9780374270605
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 733