Lydia Davis

A new collection of short stories from the woman Rick Moody has called 2the best prose stylist in America3.

"From one of the most accomplished writers of our time comes another brilliant collection of short fiction. Artful, agile, and inventive; Lydia Davis' newest collection of stories delves into topics ranging from marriage to tiny insects. These stories are a celebration of language and careful observation that once again confirms Davis' sincere love and mastery of the form" --

Lydia Davis's collection Almost No Memory is richly inventive array of playful philosophical investigations, involuted domestic disputes, and fables of the dark fantastic. With wittily restrained intensity, she again portrays the contemplative self-caught in the paradoxical world. In 'Pastor Elaine's Newsletter,' a harried mother studies a Bible passage; in 'Foucault and Pencil,' a troubled analyst on her way home from a session attempts to distract...

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize! "You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence....

The thirty-four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis's trademarks-dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is "a magician of self-consciousness."

"Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." --Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace...

'!for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart.' Married to Charles, a provincial doctor, Emma Bovary yearns for a more glamorous life. Disenchanted with her husband and seeking an escape from their dull marriage she is soon tempted into a brief romantic liaison with another man. Although short-lived, she remains desirous of passion...

On the border of Scotland and England beginning in the early 1880s, two sheep farmers and their sheepdogs engage in a years-long battle to prove their superiority in handling sheep--a battle which must end in death.

Marcel Proust's genius for illuminating pain is on spectacular display in this recently discovered trove of his correspondence, Letters to His Neighbor. Already suffering from noise within his cork-line walls, he was not ready for the fresh assault of a new upstairs neighbor, Dr. Williams, a dentist with a thriving practice directly overhead. Chiefly to Mme Williams, these ever-polite letters (often accompanied by flowers, compliments, books, or even...