The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux September 2009 $30.00US ISBN-13: 978-0374270605 ISBN-10: 0374270600

“Finally, one can read a large portion of Davis’s work, spanning three decades and more than seven hundred pages, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view—a body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic beauty, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom. I suspect that The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal, like the work of Flannery O’Connor, or Donald Barthelme, or J.F. Powers.”
--James Wood, The New Yorker

“Among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more.”
—Jonathan Franzen

“All who know [Davis’s] work probably remember their first time reading it . . . Blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction.”
—Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s

“Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising.”
—Joyce Carol Oates

“The best prose stylist in America.”
—Rick Moody

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 are 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.

About the Author
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 acclaimed translator of a new edition of Swann’s Way and is at work on a new translation of Madame Bovary.