Lydia Davis

"A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis"--

A new collection of short stories from the woman Rick Moody has called "the best prose stylist in America" Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of "Bloomington" reads, "Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before." Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates,"...

Lydia Davis's collection Almost No Memory is richly inventive array of playful philosophical investigations, involuted domestic disputes, and fables of the dark fantastic. With wittily restrained intensity, she again portrays the contemplative self-caught in the paradoxical world. In 'Pastor Elaine's Newsletter,' a harried mother studies a Bible passage; in 'Foucault and Pencil,' a troubled analyst on her way home from a session attempts to distract...

The thirty-four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis's trademarks-dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is "a magician of self-consciousness."

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....

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE A LOS ANGELES TIMES FICTION FAVORITE FOR 2009 A SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BEST BOOK OF 2009 Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called " an American virtuoso of the short story form" ( Salon.com ) and " one of the quiet giants . . . of American...

"A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis"--

The narrator interrupts reminiscences about his childhood spent in late-nineteenth-century France to recall the affair which a friend of the family carries on with young Odette de Crecy.

Flaubert's classic tale, in which the title character turns to spending and a series of affairs to combat the boredom of married life and, heartbroken and crippled by debts, takes drastic action that results in tragedy.

Marcel Proust's genius for illuminating pain is on spectacular display in this recently discovered trove of his correspondence, Letters to His Neighbor. Already suffering from noise within his cork-line walls, he was not ready for the fresh assault of a new upstairs neighbor, Dr. Williams, a dentist with a thriving practice directly overhead. Chiefly to Mme Williams, these ever-polite letters (often accompanied by flowers, compliments, books, or even...