Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read The Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality. ( Independent on Sunday ). Find out why fellow authors like Ali Smith, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen love Lydia Davis' writing so much in this landmark collection of all of her stories to date from across three decades. And why James Wood described this book in 'The New Yorker' as 'a body of work probably unique in American writing' and 'one of the great, strange American literary contributions'.

By:   Lydia Davis
Imprint:   Penguin
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 32mm,  Width: 198mm,  Spine: 129mm
Weight:   514g
ISBN:  

9780241950036

ISBN 10:   0241950031
Pages:   752
Publication Date:   November 2011
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock at Abbey's Bookshop
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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 was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her translations of modern French writers, including Blanchot and Proust.

Among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction. -- San Francisco Chronicle Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more. --JONATHAN FRANZEN <br> 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 <br> Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising. --JOYCE CAROL OATES <br> The best prose stylist in America. --RICK MOODY This welcome collection of Lydia Davis's short fiction, which gathers stories from four previously published volumes, reveals that her obsessions have remained fairly consistent over the past 30 years: frustrated love, the entanglements of language, the writer engaged in the act of writing. But even when Davis traverses familiar territory, her masterful sentence style and peculiar perceptiveness make each work unmistakably distinct. Davis is known for her ability to pack big themes into a tight space; many stories here are less than a page, and some consist of only one sentence. The longer pieces frequently find her narrators making much out of the seemingly meager. In The Bone, which first appeared in the collection Break It Down, a woman describes in detached detail the night a fishbone was caught in her now ex-husband's throat. In The Mice a narrator feels rejected by the mice that will not come into her kitchen, as they come into the kitchens of [her] neighbors. --Kimberly King Parsons, Time Out New York Lydia Davis is one of the best writers in America, a fact that has been kept under wraps by her specialization in short fiction rather than the novel and her discomfort with the idea of one event following another in some sensible pattern, an expectation she frequently plays with, as a kitten will with your fingers. Watch out for those teeth and claws. With the publication of thise