Break It Down: Stories
Ebook
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Overview
“These stories . . . offer a peephole into a distinct fictional world . . . they attest to the author’s gift as an observer and archivist of emotion.” —The New York Times
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.”
Praise for Lydia Davis
“Davis is one of the most precise and economical writers we have.” —Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s
“An American virtuoso of the short story form.” —Salon
“The best prose stylist in America.” —Rick Moody
“[Davis has] a capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence.” —Siddhartha Deb, The New York Times
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.”
Praise for Lydia Davis
“Davis is one of the most precise and economical writers we have.” —Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s
“An American virtuoso of the short story form.” —Salon
“The best prose stylist in America.” —Rick Moody
“[Davis has] a capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence.” —Siddhartha Deb, The New York Times
- Title: Break It Down: Stories
- Author: Lydia Davis
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 196
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781429957984, 1429957980
- Resource ID: LLS:9781429957984
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-21T10:25:42Z
Lydia Davis is the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and several story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.