Lydia Davis Books In Order

Novels

  1. The End of the Story (1994)

Collections

  1. The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976)
  2. Story, and Other Stories (1983)
  3. Break It Down (1986)
  4. Almost No Memory (1997)
  5. Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001)
  6. Varieties of Disturbance (2007)
  7. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009)
  8. The Cows (2011)
  9. Can’t and Won’t (2014)

Novellas

  1. Sketches For A Life Of Wassily (1981)
  2. Thyroid Diary: A Story (2020)

Non fiction

  1. Letters to the Lady Upstairs (2017)
  2. Essays One (2019)
  3. Essays Two (2021)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Lydia Davis Books Overview

The End of the Story

This engagingly human and candid novel takes us deep into a world of obsession in which a happily settled woman attempts to piece together the fragments of an unresolved episode from her past. She recalls a period when, as a writer in her thirties, she was living and working on the other coast and found herself involved in a powerful yet uncertain relationship with a much younger man. As she examines and reinterprets events from the distance of time, she recounts in absorbing detail the increasing complexity of her experience, its gradual dissolution, and the disorienting spaces it left behind. With ruthless honesty, artful analysis, and crystalline depictions of human and natural landscapes, The End of the Story combines a deeply serious intention with an abiding sense of the absurd as it illuminates the dilemmas of loss and the fallibility of memory.

Break It Down

The thirty four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis’s trademarks dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is a magician of self consciousness.

Almost No Memory

Philosophical inquiry, examinations of language, and involuted domestic disputes are the focus of Lydia Davis’s inventive collection of short fiction, Almost No Memory. In each of these stories, Davis reveals an empathic, sometimes shattering understanding of human relationships.

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

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 shes set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. In these and other stories, Lydia Davis once again proves herself to be one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction Los Angeles Times.

Varieties of Disturbance

Lydia Davis has been called ‘one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction’ Los Angeles Times, ‘an American virtuoso of the short story form’ Salon, an innovator who attempts ‘to remake the model of the modern short story’ The New York Times Book Review. Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are ‘moving…
and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking.’In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life. No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICEA LOS ANGELES TIMES FICTION FAVORITE FOR 2009A SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BEST BOOK OF 2009Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called an American virtuoso of the short story form Salon. com 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 nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

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