A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and an extended immersion in the city of Arles, showcasing Man Booker International Prize winner Lydia Davis’ sharp literary mind and invaluable insight.
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. In Essays I, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades.
In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote’s painting, and from the Shepherd’s Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today.
Following her acclaimed translation of Swann’s Way, Lydia Davis offers a partial alphabet of Proust translation problems—and their solutions. She muses on the near-impossibility of summarizing works by Maurice Blanchot, and ends with a group of short narratives that explore the space between dream and waking reality. This cahier is a wondrous adventure into the perils and delights of translating, of reading—and of dreaming.
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she's set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction."
