Description
A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her "a magician of self-consciousness," while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, "Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive."
Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. With Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered under one cover essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past four decades. In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashberry's translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote's painting from a close study of the Shepherd's Psalm to a presentation of early tourist photographs.
Davis is best known for her masterful stories and translations, but her peerless style is not bound by genre or form. Nor is the quality of her patient and thoughtful attention, as she turns her lens, here, on a range of subjects - reading, writing, memory, et al. In whatever she writes, Davis, with her wry and haunting voice, her generous and incisive curiosity, makes a singular contribution to American letters.
Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her "a magician of self-consciousness," while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, "Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive."
Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. With Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered under one cover essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past four decades. In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashberry's translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote's painting from a close study of the Shepherd's Psalm to a presentation of early tourist photographs.
Davis is best known for her masterful stories and translations, but her peerless style is not bound by genre or form. Nor is the quality of her patient and thoughtful attention, as she turns her lens, here, on a range of subjects - reading, writing, memory, et al. In whatever she writes, Davis, with her wry and haunting voice, her generous and incisive curiosity, makes a singular contribution to American letters.
Info
ISBN: 9780374148850
Published Date: November 12, 2019
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Language: English
Page Count: 512
Size: 7.82" l x 5.38" w x 1.71" h
Category
Literary Collections
Subject
Essays