From Powells.com
The writers your life won't be complete without.
Staff Pick
It can be hard to pinpoint what makes Lydia Davis's writing so magnetic. Her precise, no-nonsense language combined with her liberal definition of the short story? Her attention to the overlooked, the mundane, the clutter in our lives that holds so much meaning? Her understated sense of humor, so deeply ingrained in her observations about the absurdities of life? Whatever it is, you'll find it in spades in her Collected Stories, which compiles all of Davis's short fiction from her seminal Break It Down (1986) through Varieties of Disturbance (2007). Few writers' work lends itself so well to a compilation. Whether you pick stories at random or start at the beginning and work your way through the collection (highly recommended), this is a book that feels like the best gift: fun, poignant, and endlessly rewarding. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Los Angeles Times Fiction Favorite for 2009
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2009
Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon.com) and one of the quiet giants...of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed 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.
Review
Among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction.” San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Davis nervily inhabits obsessive and haunted personas, her intonation shifting with unsettling precision from the sly to the sinister....Davis approaches the short-story form with jazzy experimentation, tinkering with lists, circumlocutions, even interviews where the questions have been creepily edited out. You don't work your way across this mesa-sized collection so much as pogo-stick about, plunging in wherever the springs meet the page." The New York Times
Review
"Finally, one can read a large portion of Davis's work, spanning three decades and more than seven hundred pages, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. I suspect that The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal, like the work of Flannery O'Connor, or Donald Barthelme, or J. F. Powers." James Wood, The New Yorker
Review
Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more.” Jonathan Franzen
Review
All who know [Davis's] work probably remember their first time reading it....Blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction.” Dave Eggers, McSweeney's
Review
"Davis, unlike some writers of nontraditional fiction, doesn't take 'stop making sense' as her personal motto. Her art lies in getting the reader to look at everyday situations from a new and different perspective. This will be prized by those who are already fans of Davis's work and should also appeal to discerning readers of more plot-driven, conventional fiction ready for something challenging and thought-provoking." Library Journal
Review
Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising.” Joyce Carol Oates
Synopsis
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 will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. She is at work on a translation of
Madame Bovary.
Table of Contents
BREAK IT DOWN (1986)
Story
The Fears of Mrs. Orlando
Liminal: The Little Man
Break It Down
Mr. Burdoff's Visit to Germany
What She Knew
The Fish
Mildred and the Oboe
The Mouse
The Letter
Extracts from a Life
The House Plans
The Brother-in-Law
How W. H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend's House:
Mothers
In a House Besieged
Visit to Her Husband
Cockroaches in Autumn
The Bone
A Few Things Wrong with Me
Sketches for a Life of Wassilly
City Employment
Two Sisters
The Mother
Therapy
French Lesson I: Le Meurtre
Once a Very Stupid Man
The Housemaid
The Cottages
Safe Love
Problem
What an Old Woman Will Wear
The Sock
Five Signs of Disturbance ALMOST NO MEMORY (1997)
Meat, My Husband
Jack in the Country
Foucault and Pencil
The Mice
The Thirteenth Woman
The Professor
The Cedar Trees
The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall
Wife One in Country
The Fish Tank
The Center of the Story
Love
Our Kindness
A Natural Disaster
Odd Behavior
St. Martin
Agreement
In the Garment District
Disagreement
The Actors
What Was Interesting
In the Everglades
The Family
Trying to Learn
To Reiterate
Lord Royston's Tour
The Other
A Friend of Mine
This Condition
Go Away
Pastor Elaine's Newsletter
A Man in Our Town
A Second Chance
Fear
Almost No Memory
Mr. Knockly
How He Is Often Right
The Rape of the Tanuk Women
What I Feel
Lost Things
Glenn Could
Smoke
From Below, as a Neighbor
The Great-Grandmothers
Ethics
The House Behind
The Outing
A Position at the University
Examples of Confusion
The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists
Affinity
SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT (2001)
Boring Friends
A Mown Lawn
City People
Betrayal
The White Tribe
Our Trip
Special Chair
Certain Knowledge from Herodotus
Priority
The Meeting
Companion
Blind Date
Examples of Remember
Old Mother and the Grouch
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
New Year's Resolution
First