The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

ISBN: 9780374270605

出版社: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

出版年: 2009-9-29

页数: 752

定价: USD 30.00

装帧: Hardcover

内容简介

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven 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 a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust.

Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. 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). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National book Award finalist Varieties of Disturbance.

作者简介

Lydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest. . . . Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.” In 2013 She was the winner of the Man Booker International prize.

Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”

Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others.

Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.

The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.”

Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976).

Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.”

Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.

She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.

Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."

BREAK IT DOWN (1986)
Story
The Fears of Mrs. Orlando
Liminal: The Little Man
Break It Down
Mr. Burdoff's Visit to Germany
What She Knew
The Fish
Mildred and the Oboe
The Mouse
The Letter
Extracts from a Life
The House Plans
The Brother-in-Law
How W. H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend's House:
Mothers
In a House Besieged
Visit to Her Husband
Cockroaches in Autumn
The Bone
A Few Things Wrong with Me
Sketches for a Life of Wassilly
City Employment
Two Sisters
The Mother
Therapy
French Lesson I: Le Meurtre
Once a Very Stupid Man
The Housemaid
The Cottages
Safe Love
Problem
What an Old Woman Will Wear
The Sock
Five Signs of Disturbance
ALMOST NO MEMORY (1997)
Meat, My Husband
Jack in the Country
Foucault and Pencil
The Mice
The Thirteenth Woman
The Professor
The Cedar Trees
The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall
Wife One in Country
The Fish Tank
The Center of the Story
Love
Our Kindness
A Natural Disaster
Odd Behavior
St. Martin
Agreement
In the Garment District
Disagreement
The Actors
What Was Interesting
In the Everglades
The Family
Trying to Learn
To Reiterate
Lord Royston's Tour
The Other
A Friend of Mine
This Condition
Go Away
Pastor Elaine's Newsletter
A Man in Our Town
A Second Chance
Fear
Almost No Memory
Mr. Knockly
How He Is Often Right
The Rape of the Tanuk Women
What I Feel
Lost Things
Glenn Could
Smoke
From Below, as a Neighbor
The Great-Grandmothers
Ethics
The House Behind
The Outing
A Position at the University
Examples of Confusion
The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists
Affinity
SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT (2001)
Boring Friends
A Mown Lawn
City People
Betrayal
The White Tribe
Our Trip
Special Chair
Certain Knowledge from Herodotus
Priority
The Meeting
Companion
Blind Date
Examples of Remember
Old Mother and the Grouch
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
New Year's Resolution
First Grade: Handwriting Practice
Interesting
Happiest Moment
Jury Duty
A Double Negative
The Old Dictionary
Honoring the Subjunctive
How Difficult
Losing Memory
Letter to a Funeral Parlor
Thyroid Diary
Information from the North Concerning the Ice:
Murder in Bohemia
Happy Memories
They Take Turns Using a Word They Like
Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman
Mir the Hessian
My Neighbors in a Foreign Place
Oral History (with Hiccups)
The Patient
Right and Wrong
Alvin the Typesetter
Special
Selfish
My Husband and I
Spring Spleen
Her Damage
Workingmen
In a Northern Country
Away from Home
Company
Finances
The Transformation
Two Sisters (II)
The Furnace
Young and Poor
The Silence of Mrs. Separate
Almost Over: Seperate Bedrooms
Money
Acknowledgment
VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE (2007)
A Man from her Past
Dog and Me
Enlightened
The Good Taste Contest
Collaboration with Fly
Kafka Cooks Dinner
Tropical Storm
Good Times
Idea for a Short Documentary Film
Forbidden Subjects
Two Types
The Senses
Grammar Questions
Hand
The Caterpillar
Child Care
We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders
Passing Wind
Television
Jane and the Cane
Getting to Know Your Body
Absentminded
Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho
The Walk
Varieties of Disturbance
Lonely
Mrs. D and Her Maids
20 Sculptures in One Hour
Nietszche
What You Learn About the Baby
Her Mother's Mother
How It Is Done
Insomnia

关键词：The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis