The Collected Stories

Lydia Davis writes stories that are sometimes a paragraph long, sometimes a sentence, sometimes several pages — and in each of them, regardless of length, she does something that very few writers attempt and fewer accomplish: she takes a single thought, a single observation, a single failure of communication or understanding, and turns it until every facet catches the light. The question ‘Can I tell you something?’ becomes a meditation on desire and withholding. A woman’s inability to remember her dream becomes a story about the nature of memory. A man’s relationship with his dog illuminates every relationship he has ever had.

Davis has been called the most original American fiction writer of her generation, and these collected stories — spanning four decades — make the case comprehensively. Her influences are French (Flaubert, Proust, Blanchot), her method is empirical, and her results are completely unlike anyone else’s.

Essential contemporary fiction — and a book that will change how you think about what a story can be. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.