The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Author: Lydia Davis | Language: English | ISBN:
B004774AS0 | Format: EPUB
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Description
Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (
Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (
Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking
Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee
Varieties of Disturbance.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.
- File Size: 713 KB
- Print Length: 749 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0374270600
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 26, 2010)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004774AS0
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,886 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > United States - #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Short Stories - #21
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Single Authors
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > United States - #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Short Stories - #21
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Single Authors
I was pointed to this book by the most glowing review I have ever read in the New Yorker. The gist was that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that over the course of four collections of stories, a very full character is painted. I would agree with that. These stories feel very autobiographical, some, especially for their brevity feel like they capture an event that has just occurred - almost impressionistic. At the end, we have a very good feeling for a character, whether this is Lydia or not, is sort of moot. That's a pretty significant literary achievement.
Here's the problem. This isn't the world's shortest book. I think what is actually the case is that the fourth collection is really a great book and that LD has significantly grown as a writer into probably a major writer. That isn't really evident in the first two collections, and while reading them gives you further depth of attachment to the character, I'm not sure it's time optimally spent. I've got Faulkner's Collected and Borges Collected stories sitting on the shelf ignored while I pass them over for a very enthusiastically reviewed orange tome. Ok, that's not a particularly fair comparison, but hey, it's what happened.
There are great moments in each of the collections, but those moments are very close together in the final collection. How Shall I Mourn Them is heartbreaking, and a good example of how appropriate a literary experiment is to grieving. There is so little comforting at the moment of when pain feels so particular and personal in recognizing how common rending grief is. The uniqueness of an experiment seems absolutely right. Barthelme's The Dead Father has something of the same feeling.
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