Can't and Won't

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