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...

The End of the Story is an energetic, candid, and funny novel about an enduring obsession and a woman's attempt to control it by the telling of the story of it. With ruthless honesty, artful analysis, and crystalline depictions of human and natural landscapes, Lydia Davis's novel offers a compelling illumination of the dilemmas of loss and the process of remembering.

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....

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."

From one of the most accomplished writers of our time comes another brilliant collection of short fiction. Artful, deft, and inventive; Lydia Davis' newest collection of stories delves into topics ranging from marriage to tiny insects. These stories are a celebration of language and careful observation that once again confirms Davis' sincere love and mastery of the form. Only available at independent bookstores and libraries, by request of the author....

"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, Madame Bovary, and Michel Leiris. 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...

This "anthology begins in 1970 and brings together a half century of powerful American short stories from all genres, including—for the first time in a collection of this scale—science fiction, horror, and fantasy, placing writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, and Stephen King next to some beloved greats of the literary form: Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Denis Johnson. Culling widely, John Freeman, the former...

For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shocks us today about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the...

"Twenty contemporary authors introduce twenty sterling examples of the short story from the pages of The Paris Review"--Cover.