Can't and Won't
by
Lydia Davis
Can't and Won't is the new collection from Lydia Davis, one of the greatest short story writers alive.
Lydia 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.
Lydia 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.
Reviews
Widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today.
This is what the best and most original literature can do: make us more acutely aware of life on and off the page.
[Can’t and Won’t] is evidence of a writer who is in total control of her own peculiar original voice; its ¬pleasures are un¬expected and manifold.
A master of sequencing. Davis mixes long and short dispatches to intoxicating effect.
The most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years.
