3.0
Can't and Won't
ByPublisher Description
Lydia Davis's stories may be literal one-liners, like the pithy "Bloomington." Or they may be surprising investigations into mundane disruptions, such as "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates." 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
, 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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesCan't and Won't Reviews
3.0
Iva
Created about 21 hours agoShare
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Jasmine Seale
Created about 1 month agoShare
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“It’s beautifully constructed. It doesn’t follow the usual structure—cut into bits of stories, sometimes captured in sentences, lists, or letters. It’s genius to write the book this way. But that strategy itself made it hard to land. A unique creative writing piece, but it lacks the soul that makes it hard to push through. I tried to finish it because I admire the structure, but it’s hard to connect with the words, even though it's beautifully written—to see the characters and, really, feel the story. It feels like an imbalance scale between resonance and structure.”
Mariam
Created 3 months agoShare
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textualtravis
Created 3 months agoShare
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About Lydia Davis
is the author of one novel and four previous
story collections, the most recent of which,
, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is also
the acclaimed translator of
(2003)
and
(2010), both of which were awarded the French American Foundation Translation Prize.
, published in 2009, was described by James Wood in
as a "grand cumulative achievement." She is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
Other books by Lydia Davis
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