Description

Can’t and Won’t is the new collection from Lydia Davis, one of the greatest short story writers alive.

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.

Publisher Review

The most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years -- John Freeman * Boston Globe * Profound, beautiful, moving. You will go back to a little gem that has wormed its way into your mind and stuck there, and discover that it is indeed a little gem, which sparkles a different way each time and flashes with a brief beauty or hidden meaning -- Susan Hill * Spectator * Davis hints insistently at how abundant nothingness can be when we bother to look at it -- Joshua Cohen * Times Literary Supplement * Among my most favourite writers. Read her now! -- A. M. Homes Can't and Won't shows Davis using precise language to articulate the kind of ideas and impressions which are usually left to float around the subconscious -- Max Liu * Independent *