Lydia Davis

Lätt komiska och synnerligen problematiska episoder länkar samman de få invånarna i en liten by i New England. Våra främlingar är en rättfram betraktelse av hur alla hör samman med sin nästa även om de skiljer sig åt, och trots närheten till varandra är totala främlingar. En annan av mina grannar har äkta mattor och ibland funderar jag på att stjäla en. Hon behöver inte alla. I vardagsrummet har hon stora mattor, och flera mindre längs med hela hallen och i sovrummet på övervåningen. Mina golv är till största delen kala.Novellen ingår tillsammans med åtta andra berättelser i serien Novellix Grannar.Lydia Davis, född 1947, är en amerikansk författare och översättare. Davis är framför allt känd för sina noveller, som ibland inte är längre än några meningar. Hennes berättelser lyckas främmandegöra vardagliga ting och företeelser med en nästintill prosalyrisk fragmentarisk ton, aldrig utan subtil humor. Efter att ha varit verksam som författare i närmare 40 år tilldelades hon hösten 2013 det anrika brittiska Man Booker Prize, med ett internationellt genombrott som följd. Hittills har Lydia Davis skrivit 14 novellsamlingar, samt romanen The End of the Story. När hennes senaste samling Jag har det rätt bekvämt men skulle kunna ha det lite bekvämare (och andra noveller) utkom på svenska 2015, hyllades den av Sigrid Combüchen i SvD som “Årets bok. Och nästa.”

Lydia Davis skriver kortprosa med høy grad av gjenkjennelsesverdi og et høyt språklig nivå. Tekstene kan bestå av én setning. Eller de kan over flere sider utforske kaoset som oppstår gjennom små forstyrrelser i den daglige rutinen. Fortellingene kommer i form av klagebrev, i form av utdrag fra Flauberts korrespondanse; de er inspirert av forfatterens egne drømmer, eller av drømmene til vennene hennes.

The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013.'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.'Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fictionBack in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel. 'Extraordinary' Newsday'Brilliant' New Yorker'Breathtakingly elegant' Details'Beautifully written' Marie Claire'Astonishing' ElleLydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. 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.

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 2013Lydia 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. HomesLydia 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.

NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New York Times - Los Angeles Times - The Boston GlobeHer stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of "Bloomington" reads, "Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before." Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert's correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author's own dreams, or the dreams of friends. What does not vary throughout Can't and Won't, Lydia Davis's fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.

The collected stories of Lydia Davis kom ut i 2009, og vi har fått lov til å sette sammen vårt eget utvalg av 45 tekster, valgt ut fra hennes fire tekstsamlinger Break it down, Almost no memory, Samuel Johnson is indignant og Varieties of disturbance. Utvalget er ved oversetter Johanne Fronth-Nygren. Hun har også skrevet et etterord som introduserer leseren for Davis forfatterskap. Lydia Davis’ fortellinger er beskjedne, opptar ikke store plassen, smykker seg ikke med etablerte genrebetegnelser, påstår ikke å ha svar på spørsmålene de stiller, avgrenser seg til det infraordinære, det som er så hverdagslig at det stort sett passerer ubemerket under radaren. Flyktige tanker, automatiske gester, tilfeldige kommentarer, ubevisste utelatelser, mangel på tilstedeværelse. Med presisjon synliggjør hun det usynlige. Med klarhet gjengir hun det uklare. Derfor blir det lett til at man etter å ha lest Davis stadig sammenligner dagligdagse situasjoner med fortellingene hennes. Fortellingene antar arketypiske kvaliteter, dagliglivet byr på illustrasjoner av dem. Det er fristende å si at man begynner å se verden gjennom “daviske” øyne.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis.WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013.'Big rejoicing: Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize. Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch. Best of all, a new audience will read her now and find her wit, her vigour and rigour, her funniness, her thoughtfulness, and the precision of form, which mark Davis out as unique.Daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic [she] reminds you, in a world that likes to bandy its words about, what words such as economy, precision and originality really mean. This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust. A two-liner from Davis, or a seemingly throwaway paragraph, will haunt. What looks like a game will open to deep seriousness; what looks like philosophy will reveal playfulness, tragicomedy, ordinariness; what looks like ordinariness will ask you to look again at Davis's writing. In its acuteness, it always asks attentiveness, and it repays this by opening up to its reader like possibility, or like a bush covered in flowerheads.She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith'What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read' Metro'I loved these stories. They are so well-written, with such clarity of thought and precision of language. Excellent' William Leith, Evening Standard'Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read Collected Stories 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'A body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure and human wisdom' New Yorker'Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. She can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking, or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical. I felt I had encountered a most original and daring mind' Colm Toibin, Daily TelegraphLydia 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.

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material." Excerpts: It was given to me, in the nineteenth century, to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments; and the world has been to me, even from childhood,a great museum. — Lydia Davis Bad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catches under the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped on a sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us like a snow-drift. — Eliot Weinberge

Each issue of the quarterly is completely redesigned. There have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head. McSweeney's has won multiple literary awards, including two National Magazine Awards for fiction, and has had numerous stories appear in The Best American Magazine Writing, the "O", Henry Awards anthologies, and "The Best American Short Stories". Design awards given to the quarterly include the AIGA 50 Books Award, the AIGA 365 Illustration Award, and the Print Design Regional Award.

"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her. The piece, written with understated humor and empathy, is a series of detailed observations of the cows on different days and in different positions, moods, and times of the day. It could be compared to some sections of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" or to Claude Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.Forms of play: head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you; circling each other; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.

Lydia Davis udkommer nu for første gang på dansk med sin anmelderroste novellesamling Kakerlakker om efteråret. Novellesamlingen er samtidig første bind i Forlaget Vandkunstens serie med fortællinger. De 34 noveller i Kakerlakker om efteråret er Lydia Davis, når hun er bedst. Mens hendes fortællinger viser en fornuftig og ordnet verden, antyder hendes karakterer, at livet, tænkningen og sproget er fuld af kaos. Hun er kortfattet og humoristisk; nogle af novellerne er ikke mere end et par linjer lange og placerer sig et sted mellem digt, filosofi og novelle. Men fortællingerne er hverken prætentiøse eller svære, de er tværtimod både tilgængelige og ligefremme, og både hendes evne til at overraske og hendes underspillede humor bevæger sig som en rød tråd gennem novellesamlingen. Lydia Davis (født 1947) er amerikansk forfatter og oversætter. Hun har oversat Proust, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Leiris og flere andre fransk forfattere til engelsk. Hun er professor i creative writing ved universitet SUNY i Albany. Fra 1974 til 1978 var hun gift med Paul Auster, som hun har sønnen Daniel Auster sammen med. I dag er hun gift med maleren Alan Cote, med hvem hun har sønnen Theo Cote. Lydia Davis har skrevet syv novellesamlinger og en roman.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters. 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. "Among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction." --San Francisco Chronicle

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. Varieties of Disturbance is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair--such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

The author of Almost No Memory presents an inventive collection of short fiction that explores the various ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves, from a couple that suspects their friends think them boring to a funeral home that receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

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.

"The Rendezvous" is a beautiful and evocative first novel that blurs all lines between memoir and fiction. In a painfully sentimental journey, Louise, a sophisticated eighteen-year-old Parisian student, sits in a cafe awaiting the arrival of her long-absent mother, an aging hippie and former fashion model. As the hours pass and Louise waits, she reaches deeper and deeper into her store of memory, recalling the early failure of her parents' marriage. Louise remembers how brief and unfulfilling meetings with her mother have punctuated her safe and secure life with her father, a world-renowned conductor. Carefully walking the balance between anticipation and fear, Louise meditates upon the chaos of her mother's life, a life of decadence, drugs, and irresponsibility. Coming face-to-face with the powerful love she feels for her mother, Louise wryly acknowledges the complexity of a relationship filled with countless letdowns and unwavering devotion. Written with a wisdom that transcends age and the wit and savvy of a true survivor, "The Rendezvous" is a poignant examination of the transition to young adulthood and the often startling awareness of a parent's fallibility.

This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travel in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Crete, and northern Italy, as well as an extended essay on Egypt—where, when he was 24, Butor spent a year teaching French in a secondary school. Michel Butor is one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s.