With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', this title features stories that illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising.
A collection of short fiction that is written by the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013.
A work of Proust that is translated from French original into English.
With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, the author seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.
From the International Man Booker Prize-winning author of Can't and Won't and The End of the Story - a crystalline collection of literary essays for fans of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion
'She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith
'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!' A. M. Homes
The visionary, fearless Lydia Davis presents a dazzling collection of essays on reading and writing, exploring the full scope of possibility within existing forms of literature and considering how we might challenge and reinvent these forms.
Through Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin, Joan Mitchell and others, he author considers her many creative influences. And, through these lenses, she returns to her own writing process, her relationship to language and the written word. Beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating, these pieces are a masterclass in reading and writing.
Lydia Davis returns with a timeless collection of essays on literature and language.
'Precise, concentrated, lyrical. No one writes like Lydia Davis, and everyone should read her' Hanif Kureishi
'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust' Ali Smith
Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays. Now, she continues the project with Essays Two, focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles.
Every essay in this book is a revelation.
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. She longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating.