Can't and Won't: Stories

Can't and Won't: Stories

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The New York Times • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe 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 fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed 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 about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life. “Widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today.”―Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker “This is what the best and most original literature can do: make us more acutely aware of life on and off the page.”―Peter Orner, The New York Times Book Review “[Can't and Won't] is evidence of a writer who is in total control of her own peculiar original voice; its pleasures are unexpected and manifold.”―Kate Christensen, Elle “A master of sequencing. Davis mixes long and short dispatches to intoxicating effect.”―Dwight Garner, The New York Times “The most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years.”―John Freeman, The Boston Globe “Drop everything and pick up Lydia Davis's fifth collection of short stories...Observation, drama, and (yes) compression―it's all there, giving the most minor moments a kind of epic weight.”―David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.”―Claire Messud, Financial Times “Davis dances right up to and around that final mystery that can't, won't, and must be borne, that most inexplicable magic trick, life's vanishing act.”―Parul Sehgal, NPR “Davis is official literary dynamite...Everything she writes looks effortless.”― San Francisco Chronicle 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. Can't and Won't Stories By Lydia Davis Picador Copyright © 2015 Lydia Davis All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-250-06243-7 A Story of Stolen Salamis     My son’s Italian landlord in Brooklyn kept a shed out back in which he cured and smoked salamis. One night, in the midst of a wave of petty vandalism and theft, the shed was broken into and the salamis were taken. My son talked to his landlord about it the next day, commiserating over the vanished sausages. The landlord was resigned and philosophical, but corrected him: “They were not sausages. They were salamis.” Then the incident was written up in one of the city’s more prominent magazines as an amusing and colorful urban incident. In the article, the reporter called the stolen goods “sausages.” My son showed the article to his landlord, who hadn’t known about it. The landlord was interested and pleased that the magazine had seen fit to report the incident, but he added: “They weren’t sausages. They were salamis.” The Dog Hair The dog is gone. We miss him. When the doorbell rings, no one barks. When we come home late, there is no one waiting for us. We still find his white hairs here and there around the house and on our clothes. We pick them up. We should throw them away. But they are all we have left of him. We don’t throw them away. We have a wild hope—if only we collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again. Circular Story On Wednesday mornings early there is always a racket out there on the road. It wakes me up and I always wonder what it is. It is always the trash collection truck picking up the trash. The truck comes every Wednesday morning early. It always wakes me up. I always wonder what it is