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

Aylén Abril Costantini 

** spoiler alert **
           No me gustó mucho para ser sincera. Lo compré pensando en lo interesante de un libro de cuentos tan cortos, pero me parecieron casi todos olvidables. En el momento en el que pasaste la página ya te olvidaste del cuento anterior porque no te deja ni genera absolutamente nada, ni una sola emoción. Inclusive el de las vacas me resultó insoportable, o sea la emoción que me generó ni siquiera fue buena. Por otro lado, es como si alguien publicara cualquier cosa escrita, hay un cuento que es una lista de sonidos de objetos y otro cuento que son obituarios de personas, faltaba que publicara una lista de supermercado, aburridisimo. Rescato uno que me pareció muy movilizante, el de las focas. Hay cinco o seis más que me gustaron. El resto o me molestaron o no me los acuerdo.

Eva Gonçalves 

azliana aziz

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.

Lindsy Rice

Will Vunderink

Carolyn Yoo

Rebecca Raincrow

Trevor Berrett

Lydia Davis has been universally acclaimed for the wit, insight and genre-defying formal inventiveness of her sparkling stories. With titles like A Story of Stolen Salamis, The Problem of the Vacuum Cleaner, Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturerand Can't and Won't, the stories in this new collection illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising. Above all the stories revel in and grapple with the joys and constraints of language - achieving always the extraordinary, unmatched precision which makes Lydia Davis one of the greatest contemporary writers on the international stage. 'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!' A. M. Homes 'Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. She can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical . . . A most original and daring mind.' Colm Toibin,Daily Telegraph '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. She's a joy.' Ali Smith

Can't and Won't Stories

Reviews