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.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

A fifth collection by the author of the National Book Award finalist, Varieties of Disturbance, includes pithy one-liners, exploratory observations and letters of complaint, including "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," in which a professor is stymied by her choices. 50,000 first printing.

Stories

Can't and Won't

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 I: Reading and Writing, 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.

Essays One

A Novel

The End of the Story

Presents a collection of short fiction, including "What you Learn about the Baby" in which a mother describes how an infant disrupts her life and "Jane and Cane" details an elderly woman's search for her missing cane.

Varieties of Disturbance

'A trailblazer in the world of short-form prose' New YorkerLydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers.Our Strangers is a fascinating collection that confirms the genius of a writer whose every attention is transformative.

Our Strangers

Moving across the country to take a job, a writer in her thirties finds herself absorbed in a complex relationship with a much younger man and struggles with its eventual breakdown and a long subsequent period of recovery. Reprint.

Presents a collection of short stories that captures the convolutions of human relationships and the boundaries of the self. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Almost No Memory

Lucia Berlin

The New York Times bestseller 'This selection of 43 stories should by all rights see Lucia Berlin as lauded as Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver' Independent The stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fiction. With extraordinary honesty and magnetism, Lucia Berlin invites us into her rich, itinerant life: the drink and the mess and the pain and the beauty and the moments of surprise and of grace. Her voice is uniquely witty, anarchic and compassionate. Celebrated for many years by those in the know, she is about to become - a decade after her death - the writer everyone is talking about. The collection will be introduced by Lydia Davis. 'With Lucia Berlin we are very far away from the parlours of Boston and New York and quite far away, too, from the fiction of manners, unless we are speaking of very bad manners . . . The writer Lucia Berlin most puts me in mind of is the late Richard Yates.' LRB, 1999

Selected Stories

A Manual for Cleaning Women

With her trademark precision, Davis turns her eye to three beloved cows, capturing them in celebratory, delighted detail.

The Cows

Break It Down (High Risk Books)

Only available at independent bookstores and libraries, by request of the author. 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.

Our Strangers: Stories

Peter Brooks

Vivant Denon

A classic eighteenth-century French libertine work finds a young man summoned to the country estate of Madame de T--- and embarking on an escapade of passion and unexpected consummation, in a translation that is accompanied by the French text and an introduction that evaluates its themes. Original.

No Tomorrow/Point de Lendemain

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."

Break It Down

Osama Alomar

C. J. Collins

This collection of poetic fictions, or “very short stories” from one of today's most well-respected Arab poets, features satirical allegories and commentary on Bashar al-Assad's police state in Syria and on other regional current events. Original.

Fullblood Arabian

Christopher Prendergast

Marcel Proust

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics.

The Way by Swann's is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine. It contains the separate short novel, A Love of Swann's, a study of sexual jealousy that forms a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. This book established Proust as one of the greatest voices of the modern age - satirical, sceptical, confiding and endlessly varied in his responses to the human condition.

Since the original pre-war translation Remembrance of Things Past by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, there has been no completely new rendering of Proust's French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is this Penguin Classics edition of In Search of Lost Time that makes Proust accessible to a new generation.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is generally viewed as the greatest French novelist and perhaps the greatest European novelist of the 20th century. He lived much of his later life as a reclusive semi-invalid in a sound-proofed flat in Paris, giving himself over entirely to writing his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu).

The Way by Swann's

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1

The author of Almost No Memory presents an inventive collection of short fiction that explores the various ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves, from a couple that suspects their friends think them boring to a funeral home that receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Amerikan Edebiyatinin Sessiz Devlerinden.

Hikayenin Sonu

Tipos de perturbação reúne 57 narrativas breves de uma das mais potentes e originais contistas em atividade, Lydia Davis. São peças literárias de difícil classificação, trafegando na fronteira entre o conto, o ensaio, a poesia e a filosofia. Há narrativas relativamente longas, como "A sra. D. e suas empregadas", um detalhado relatório das domésticas que passaram pela casa de uma escritora de classe média, cada qual com suas características, seus problemas, seus motivos para sair do emprego. Ou como "Helen e Vi: um estudo sobre saúde e vitalidade", simulacro de ensaio comparativo da trajetória de duas senhoras idosas. Nos interstícios desses textos em tom formal, quase protocolar, revelam-se por vezes dramas pessoais profundos e fraturas sociais mal disfarçadas. Em contraste com esses relatos longos, proliferam os textos brevíssimos, não raro de um único parágrafo. Alguns se assemelham a sutis epigramas, outros a agudos aforismos. Em todos os casos, o elemento comum, além da maestria técnica da autora, é o desejo de colher os personagens em suas íntimas inseguranças e em seus desajustes com o meio circundante - os "tipos de perturbação" que dão título a um dos contos e ao livro. Nesse processo rigoroso de desvelamento, surge com mágica nitidez o absurdo da vida cotidiana, a falácia das tentativas lógicas de dar conta da complexidade do mundo humano. Nesse sentido, uma das matrizes mais visíveis da ficção de Lydia Davis é Franz Kafka, não por acaso personagem principal de um dos contos mais perturbadores e divertidos do volume. "Poucos autores em atividade conseguem fazer as palavras na página terem mais valor. " - Jonathan Franzen

Ficções

Tipos de perturbação

A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis 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 selection of her essays for the first time in 2019 with Essays One. Now, Davis continues her non-fiction project with Essays Two. This edition will, for the first time, collect Lydia Davis’s essays and talks on the art of translation, the experience of translating Proust, Flaubert and Michel Leiris, learning a foreign language through reading, and an extended immersion in the city of Arles. Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her fiction and finalist for the National Book Award, showcases her sharp literary mind and invaluable insight in this new collection of her nonfiction works.

Lydia Davis

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