Essays One

by Lydia Davis

Overview

A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.”

Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades.

In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote’s painting, and from the Shepherd’s Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250758156
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, art, memory, and the Bible. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can’t and Won’t (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as “a grand cumulative achievement.” Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Table of Contents

Preface

THE PRACTICE OF WRITING

A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked: Forms and Influences I

Commentary on One Very Short Story (“In a House Besieged”)

From Raw Material to Finished Work: Forms and Influences II

A Note on the Word Gubernatorial

VISUAL ARTISTS: JOAN MITCHELL

Joan Mitchell and Les Bluets, 1973

WRITERS

John Ashbery’s Translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations

Young Pynchon

The Story Is the Thing: Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women

A Close Look at Two Books by Rae Armantrout

Small but Perfectly Formed: Five Favorite Short Stories

VISUAL ARTISTS: JOSEPH CORNELL

The Impetus Was Delight: A Response by Analogy to the Work of Joseph Cornell

THE PRACTICE OF WRITING (2)

Sources, Revision, Order, and Endings: Forms and Influences III

Revising One Sentence

Found Material, Syntax, Brevity, and the Beauty of Awkward Prose: Forms and Influences IV

Fragmentary or Unfinished: Barthes, Joubert, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Flaubert

Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits

VISUAL ARTISTS: ALAN COTE

Energy in Color: Alan Cote’s Recent Paintings

WRITERS (2)

“Emmy Moore’s Journal” by Jane Bowles

Osama Alomar’s Very Short Tales in Fullblood Arabian

Haunting the Flea Market: Roger Lewinter’s The Attraction of Things

Red Mittens: Anselm Hollo’s Translation from the Cheremiss

In Search of Difficult Edward Dahlberg

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

VISUAL ARTISTS: EARLY TOURIST PHOTOGRAPHS

Dutch Scenes: A Portfolio of Early Twentieth-Century Tourist Photographs

WRITERS (3)

The Problem of Plot Summary in Blanchot’s Fiction

Stendhal’s Alter Ego: The Life of Henry Brulard

Maurice Blanchot Absent

A Farewell to Michel Butor

Michel Leiris’s Fibrils, Volume 3 of The Rules of the Game

THE BIBLE, MEMORY, AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME

As I Was Reading

Meeting Abraham Lincoln

“Paring Off the Amphibologisms”: Jesus Recovered by the Jesus Seminar

A Reading of the Shepherd’s Psalm

Remember the Van Wagenens

Acknowledgments and Notes

Editorial Reviews

[Davis] is our Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew. Essays One…allows us backstage, into the creation and revision of her stories, her notes on her influences: Beckett, Babel, Paley, Kafka. A few pieces offer straightforward writing advice…"How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be?" [Davis] advises the novice writer in "Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits." "Read the best writers from all different periods," she says. She's right. Begin here.

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

[Davis] is our Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew. . . These pieces exalt clear language and the complicated work of looking and seeing. . . Davis takes pure pleasure in the muscular act of looking, and invites us to look alongside her.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"She’s so deeply cerebral it’s perhaps counterintuitive that Davis is a companionable presence. She’s erudite, with catholic interests, and earnest but not humorless. This is the kind of book you could read alone in a restaurant and feel you’re lost in a stimulating conversation." —Rumaan Alam, The New Republic

“The first in a planned two-volume collection of the nonfiction of short story author Davis (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant) proves a cornucopia of illuminating and timeless observations on literature, art, and the craft of writing . . . Fans of Davis’s unfailingly clever work should add this volume to their collection, and creative writers of every genre should take the opportunity to learn from a legend.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"One gets the impression that even the most fleeting of pieces in “Essays One,” such as a few paragraphs about her favorite short stories, written for a British tabloid, has been given the precise and playful Lydia Davis treatment: “'Subtly, or less subtly, you always want to surprise a reader.'"— Brian Dillon, The New York Times Book Review

"Lively essays bound to stimulate debate among readers of global literature." —Kirkus Reviews

“Davis, an innovative fiction writer, is also an erudite essayist, critic and translator, with an ever-questing mind evident in these 33 essays . . . An essential literary companion.” —Jane Ciabattari, BBC

"Lydia Davis is one of those rare cases: an ambidextrous author who is just as capable of bowling a reader over with a short story as she is with an essay." —Malcolm Forbes, Star Tribune

"Lydia Davis is immensely learned; that is clear not only from her translation work but also from her distinguished discussions of the works she has translated. But in much of her nonfiction, she is also a master of the energies that drive her fiction, with its plain style, irony, sensitivity, and elegantly subdued power." —Sandra M. Gilbert, The American Scholar

"Davis is putting her more than 30 years of experience into a selection of essays on the craft of reading and writing; the first of the two-volume set comes out this fall. Don't expect run-of-the-mill advice like "show don't tell" here, though; Davis has made a career out of breaking the established rules . . ." —The Week

From the Publisher