Can't and Won't

Author:   Lydia Davis
Publisher:   Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN:  

9780374118587


Pages:   289
Publication Date:   08 April 2014
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

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Can't and Won't


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Overview

A new collection of short stories from the woman Rick Moody has called the best prose stylist in America Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of Bloomington reads, Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before. Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates, a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The storiesmay appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extractedfrom Flaubert's correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author's own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can't and Won't, 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 slyhumor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patternsof daily life.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lydia Davis
Publisher:   Farrar Straus Giroux
Imprint:   Farrar Straus Giroux
Dimensions:   Width: 14.70cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 21.30cm
Weight:   0.431kg
ISBN:  

9780374118587


ISBN 10:   0374118582
Pages:   289
Publication Date:   08 April 2014
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

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Reviews

Praise for Can't and Won't Davis . . . continues to hone her subtle and distinctive brand of storytelling. These poems, vignettes, thoughts, observations, and stories defy clear categorization; each one is an independent whole, but read together they strike a fine rhythm. Davis circles the same central point in each entry: her character examine the world with a detached, self-contained logic that seems to represent the process of writing itself . . . Davis's bulletproof prose sends each story shooting off the page. -- Publishers Weekly Praise for Lydia Davis: Big rejoicing: Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize. Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch, rather like one of Davis's ingenious, playful, formally inventive and unexpectedly powerful (for their size) short stories might. Best of all, a new audience will read her now and find her wit, her vigour and rigour, her funniness, her thoughtfulness, and the precision of form, which, even among short-story practitioners known for these qualities, mark Davis out as unique . . . She's such a reader's writer, this daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic writer who reminds you, in a world that likes to bandy its words about, what words such as economy, precision and originality really mean. It's all about how you read and about the reflorescence of what and how things mean with Davis, who works in an understated, concentrated way and in a form that usually slips under the mainstream radar. So look again, because this is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust. As a translator, she has recently produced magnificent English versions of classics by the latter two, but it's the short-story form that she's made her own, and even changed the potential of, over three decades of honing a style whose discipline is a perfect means of release of hilarity, myth, merciless sharpness, and, most of


Praise for Can't and Won't Can't and Won't is the most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years. Here, indeed, are objects in all their eerie mystery--knapsacks, nametags, rugs, frozen peas--vibrating with possibility; but here, too, is consciousness dramatized in a truly new way, behaving with the stubborn inertia of those very same objects . . . No story writer alive has put sentences under so much pressure, so well, so consistently. In dealing with mortality, though, Davis's observational gaze has acquired a new warmth and depth . . . The difference between the words can't and won't is created by the mind. One is inability; the other is willed refusal -- but how often are they confused? Consciousness, these stories show, so often pivots between these poles on the axis of this confusion. The genius of Can't and Won't is that Davis has created a narrative out of that oscillation. Here is a mind rubbing up against the world, with fascination and wonder and disgust. It judges and it observes. Davis writes in sentences as radically lucid as any penned by Grace Paley, who was, in her lifetime, too often belittled as a miniaturist. What is tiny--like a molecule of oxygen--allows us to breath, as these stories do with their fabulous, occult integrity. --John Freeman, The Boston Globe When Lydia Davis won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, the attempt to fix a label to her work reduced one of the judges . . . to a bit of flailing . . . Personally, I'm not sure what the problem with just calling her a writer is, unless it's this: If what she does is writing, we need a new name for what everyone else is doing . . . She makes the impossible look easy . . . Like Proust, whom she has translated, Davis writes the act of writing itself . . . her stories are filled with moments of crisis about how to carry on, or what word to put down next, and fears that it could all mean nothing in the end. She's a theorist of theh


Author Information

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and four previousstory collections, the most recent of which, Varieties of Disturbance, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is alsothe acclaimed translator of Swann's Way (2003)and Madame Bovary (2010), both of which were awarded the French American Foundation Translation Prize. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, published in 2009, was described by James Wood in The New Yorker as a grand cumulative achievement. She is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

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