Books by Lydia Davis
The End of the Story: A Novel
by Lydia Davis
Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair―such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor 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.
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Into the Weeds (Why I Write)
by Lydia Davis
An illuminating reflection on the creative process from acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and translator Lydia Davis
When asked why she writes, Lydia Davis confesses that she’s afraid of the question. Maybe she would rather not know exactly why she writes. Instead, Davis considers how she writes her stories, how other writers write, and what insights the how might provide into the why.
In this free-ranging exploration, Davis discovers that one reason she writes is for pleasure: the pleasure of encountering something that demands to be treated in language, of handling and manipulating the language into the form it ought to take, and, finally, of seeing a story exist where it didn’t exist before. As she observes the processes of some of the authors who interest her the most, she finds that there seem to be as many reasons to write as there are writers: to relive an experience, to share an experience, to articulate something one has not quite comprehended.
Reflecting on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including James Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Walter Raleigh, Christina Sharpe, Knut Hamsun, Grace Paley, Josep Pla, John Ashbery, and John Clare, Davis undertakes a clear-eyed, penetrating inquiry into the manifold reasons we choose to put pen to paper and begin something new.
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$20.00
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories
by Lydia Davis
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she's set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction."
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Can't and Won't: Stories
by Lydia Davis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The New York Times • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe
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," a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert's correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author's own dreams, or the dreams of friends.
What does not vary throughout Can't and Won't, Lydia Davis's fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.
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Can't and Won't: Stories
by 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," a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert's correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author's own dreams, or the dreams of friends.
What does not vary throughout Can't and Won't, Lydia Davis's fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.
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Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles
by Lydia Davis
A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis
In Essays One, Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a generous selection of her essays about best writing practices, representations of Jesus, early tourist photographs, and much more. Essays Two collects Davis’s writings and talks on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust (“A work of creation in its own right.” ―Claire Messud, Newsday), Madame Bovary (“[Flaubert’s] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.” ―Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review), and Michel Leiris (“Magnificent.” ―Tim Watson, Public Books). She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation.
Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, here focuses her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding on the endlessly complex relations between languages. Together with Essays One, this provocative and delightful volume cements her status as one of our most original and beguiling writers.
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No copies available.
Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles
by Lydia Davis
A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis
In Essays One, Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a generous selection of her essays about best writing practices, representations of Jesus, early tourist photographs, and much more. Essays Two collects Davis’s writings and talks on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust (“A work of creation in its own right.” ―Claire Messud, Newsday), Madame Bovary (“[Flaubert’s] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.” ―Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review), and Michel Leiris (“Magnificent.” ―Tim Watson, Public Books). She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation.
Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, here focuses her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding on the endlessly complex relations between languages. Together with Essays One, this provocative and delightful volume cements her status as one of our most original and beguiling writers.
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$22.00
Varieties of Disturbance: Stories
by Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis has been called "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times), "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon), an innovator who attempts "to remake the model of the modern short story" (The New York Times Book Review). Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are "moving . . . and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking."
In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life.
No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise.
Varieties of Disturbance is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
by Lydia Davis
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.
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 are collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.
"Among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
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$28.00
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
by Lydia Davis
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 groundbreaking Break 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.
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Essays One
by Lydia Davis
A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.”
Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades.
In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote’s painting, and from the Shepherd’s Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today.
Copies
No copies available.
Essays One
by Lydia Davis
A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.”
Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades.
In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote’s painting, and from the Shepherd’s Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today.
Copies
No copies available.
Break It Down: Stories (FSG Classics)
by Lydia Davis
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."
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Poetry Pamphlets 1-4 (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)
by Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger, Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Sylvia Legris
The first four collections in our revitalized Poetry Pamphlet series, established to highlight original work from writers around the world as well as forgotten treasures lost in the cracks of literary history.
Included are: Two American Scenes: Our Village & A Journey on the Colorado River, by Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger; Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker, by Susan Howe; The Helens of Troy, New York, by Bernadette Mayer; and Pneumatic Antiphonal, by Sylvia Legris.
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Two American Scenes (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)
by Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."
Excerpts:
It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,
to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows
that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;
and the world has been to me, even from childhood,a great museum.
― Lydia Davis
Bad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catches
under the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped on
a sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us like
a snow-drift.
― Eliot Weinberge
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Food and Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast
by Francine Prose, Steve Almond, Lydia Davis, Elissa Schappell, Anthony Swofford, Stuart Dybek, Grace Paley
Editors have assembled a delicious collection of food and drink writing that originally appeared in Tin House magazine. Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast celebrates seven years of the dazzling writing and delicious recipes of Tin House magazine’s Readable Feast and Blithe Spirits departments. Literature and gastronomy converge in an idiosyncratic survey of everything from lotus fruit, elk, and absinthe to bread, eggs, and brandy Old-Fashioneds. Ranging from the humorous to the lyrical, the historic to the personal, and humble to haute cuisine, this elegant collection includes pieces by writers such as Steve Almond, Lan Samantha Chang, Lydia Davis, Chris Offutt, Grace Paley, Francine Prose, Elissa Schappell, and Michelle Wildgen.
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Tin House: Summer Reading
by Anthony Doerr, Roddy Doyle, Lydia Davis, Win McCormack, Holly MacArthur
Tin House features over 200 pages of new, high quality literature on what each author is most passionate about be it in the form of fiction, poetry, or essay regardless of fashion or timeliness. Of the four issues published per year, this, the summer issue, is the only one unrestricted by theme. With its simple yet sharp design and engaging departments covering profiles, interviews, and food and drink writing, Tin House Magazine is fast becoming one of the most popular literary magazines available.
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The Cows (Quarternote Chapbook Series)
by Lydia Davis
"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.
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$26.00
Almost No Memory: Stories
by Lydia Davis
Philosophical inquiry, examinations of language, and involuted domestic disputes are the focus of Lydia Davis's inventive collection of short fiction, Almost No Memory. In each of these stories, Davis reveals an empathic, sometimes shattering understanding of human relationships.
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