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Stated First edition, 2014, 1st printing. 289pp. Signed on title page by Lydia Davis. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "Her 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 seventh collection of stories, is the power of her deft and precise 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, and her work always feels like a discovery: of the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating--even, sometimes, of the unexpectedly pleasurable." [jacket copy] "[Lydia Davis's] body of work is probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom."--James Wood, The New Yorker. "What Davis is evoking is conditionality, which is the great theme of this collection, indeed of her entire oeuvre. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) their brevity, her stories ask existential questions, about us and the world. . . At the center of the book is the understanding that we can locate stories anywhere, that the most regular and orderly moments are, in fact, the most violent and original, that it is up to us to notice, to re-create, to preserve. . . In many ways, CAN'T AND WON'T is like a set of William Burroughs cut-ups, random moments juxtaposed, one against the other, until reality takes on the logic of a collage. Unlike Burroughs, though, Davis' intent is not to rub out the word. Rather, language is what gives shape to the chaos, allowing us to invest existence with a shape. That this shape is of our making, our invention is the point precisely."--David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times. "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. . . She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her."--Ali Smith, The Guardian. Pristine hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in a bright-as-new jacket. Quite presentable.
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