Author(s): Lydia Davis

Short Stories | Read our reviews!

Can't and Won't is the new collection from Lydia Davis, one of the greatest short story writers alive. This title is the winner of The Man Booker International Prize 2013. Lydia Davis has been universally acclaimed for the wit, insight and genre-defying formal inventiveness of her sparkling stories. With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', the stories in this new collection illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising. Above all the stories revel in and grapple with the joys and constraints of language - achieving always the extraordinary, unmatched precision which makes Lydia Davis one of the greatest contemporary writers on the international stage. Praise for Lydia Davis: "What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read". (Metro). "To read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis 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 'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!". (A. M. Homes). Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
The narrower the aperture, the greater the depth of field. The best of Lydia Davis’s stories are little more than a detail or an image or a wry observation presented without a misplaced word or superfluous comma, precise enough to suggest that great slabs of life hinge about her words, without these slabs being fiction as such. Perhaps the distinction between actuality and fiction is too coarse to be relevant to such literature of the infra-ordinary and should be left to the literatures of the ordinary (for which this distinction is constantly contestable if ultimately unimportant) and of the extra-ordinary (for which it is pre-established in the effective contract between author and reader). Thrifty with her language, characterisation and narrative to the point of asceticism, Davis’s work attains a whittled acuity subtle enough to glance off the surfaces they address without (generally) becoming imbedded in them. The contents of this book are of three kinds: 1. Stories (though, really, except for a few that don’t work so well, they aren’t stories in the usual sense); 2. Dreams - Davis’s and others’ (although these are sort of interesting, I don’t think they belong with the stories (being extra-ordinary)); 3. Translations from letters by Flaubert (which are rather good but could perhaps have been grouped separately). One memorable story in this collection, which exemplifies the deft irony which makes Davis’s humour at once sympathetic and brutal, is ‘I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable’: merely a list of quotidian irritations that are all the more irritating for being entirely inconsequential. 

{THOMAS}