A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.
An NYRB Classics OriginalWe think of Honoré de Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called The Human Comedy. Yet along with the full-length fiction within The Human Comedy st
The Rendezvous is a beautiful and evocative first novel that blurs all lines between memoir and fiction. In a painfully sentimental journey, Louise, a sophisticated eighteen-year-old Parisian student, sits in a café awaiting the arrival of her long-absen
Philosophical inquiry, examinations of language, and involuted domestic disputes are the focus of Lydia Davis’s inventive collection of short fiction, Almost No Memory. In each of these stories, Davis reveals an empathic, sometimes shattering understand
“In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or however, we go. . . . If we are made by what we read, if l
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A couple s
Published to huge acclaim in the US, Lydia Davis? important debut collection of 34 stories seems to assure us that reality is ordered and reasonable. However, as the characters in the stories prove, misunderstanding and confusion are inherent in everyday
Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair--such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With
