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| break it down lydia davis: Break it Down Lydia Davis, 1986 |
| break it down lydia davis: Break It Down Lydia Davis, 2008-09-16 “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 |
| break it down lydia davis: Break It Down Lydia Davis, 2008-09-16 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. |
| break it down lydia davis: Can't and Won't Lydia Davis, 2014-04-08 A new collection of short stories from the woman Rick Moody has called the best prose stylist in America 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. |
| break it down lydia davis: The End of the Story Lydia Davis, 2014-04-08 The End of the Story is an energetic, candid, and funny novel about an enduring obsession and a woman's attempt to control it by the telling of the story of it. With ruthless honesty, artful analysis, and crystalline depictions of human and natural landscapes, Lydia Davis's novel offers a compelling illumination of the dilemmas of loss and the process of remembering. |
| break it down lydia davis: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Lydia Davis, 2011 Find out why fellow authors like Ali Smith, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen love Lydia Davis's writing so much in this landmark collection of all of her stories to date from across three decades. And why James Wood described this book in the New Yorkeras 'a body of work probably unique in American writing' and 'one of the great, strange American literary contributions'. 'Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read The Collected Storiesis to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality.' Independent on Sunday 'What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read.' Metro 'I loved these stories. They are so well-written, with such clarity of thought and precision of language. Excellent.' William Leith, Evening Standard 'Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality.' Independent on Sunday 'A body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure and human wisdom.' New Yorker 'One of the most respected writers in America.' Financial Times 'Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. She can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking, or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical. I felt I had encountered a most original and daring mind.' Colm Tóibín, Daily Telegraph |
| break it down lydia davis: Essays One Lydia Davis, 2019-11-12 A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as the best prose stylist in America. And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.” Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades. In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote’s painting, and from the Shepherd’s Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today. |
| break it down lydia davis: Samuel Johnson Is Indignant Lydia Davis, 2002-09 From one of the true originals of contemporary American short fiction (San Francisco Chronicle) comes this crystalline collection of investigations into the ways in which human being perceive each other and themselves. An ALA Notable Book of the Year. |
| break it down lydia davis: Varieties of Disturbance Lydia Davis, 2007-05-15 Lydia Davis has been called one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction (Los Angeles Times), an American virtuoso of the short story form (Salon), an innovator who attempts to remake the model of the modern short story (The New York Times Book Review). Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are moving . . . and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking. In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life. No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise. Varieties of Disturbance is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction. |
| break it down lydia davis: Almost No Memory Lydia Davis, 1997 Stories by an experimental writer, ranging in length from a sentence to several pages. One story describes the way a few ill-chosen words can turn a minor dispute into high drama, another is on the bad luck of an explorer who accomplishes a perilous expedition, only to die on his way home. By the author of The End of the Story. |
| break it down lydia davis: Alfred Ollivant's Bob, Son of Battle Alfred Ollivant, Lydia Davis, 2014-08-19 Bob, Son of Battle, is a sheepdog so canny and careful of his flock, so deeply devoted to his master, James Moore, and so admired for his poise and wisdom by the residents of a small village in the rugged mountains of England’s North Country, that young though he is, he is already known as Owd Bob. In a recent contest, Bob has proved himself a matchless sheepdog, and if he wins the trophy two more times, he’ll be seen as equal to the legendary sheepdogs of yore. But Bob has a real rival: Red Wull, with his docked tail and bristling yellow fur, a ferocious creature, just like his diminutive master, Adam McAdam, a lonely Scot, estranged not only from his English neighbors but from his son, David. McAdam just can’t stop belittling this strapping young man, all the more so since David began courting Moore’s beautiful daughter Maggie. But what McAdam really wants is for his beloved Wullie to wrest the prize from Bob once and for all. The story takes a darker turn when a troubling new threat to the local flocks emerges. A dog has gone rogue, sneaking out at night to feast on the flesh and blood of the sheep he is bound to protect. Again and again, new sheep fall prey to this relentless predator; again and again, he slips away undetected. This master hunter can only be among the boldest and sharpest of dogs . . . Bob, Son of Battle has long been a beloved classic of children’s literature both in America and in England. Here the celebrated author and translator Lydia Davis, who first read and loved this exciting story as a child, has rendered the challenging idioms of the original into fluent and graceful English of our day, making this tale of rival dogs and rival families and the shadowy terrain between Good and Bad accessible and appealing to readers of all ages. |
| break it down lydia davis: The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories Lydia Davis, 1976 |
| break it down lydia davis: Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert, 2011-10-04 The award-winning, nationally bestselling translation, by Lydia Davis, of one of the world’s most celebrated novels “The best English version by far, because its deadpan reminds us that the book is both a great realist novel and a satire of realism.” —Merve Emre, The New Yorker Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs in an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter. In this landmark new translation of Gustave Flaubert's masterwork, award-winning writer and translator Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of Flaubert's legendary prose style, giving new life in English to the book that redefined the novel as an art form. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. |
| break it down lydia davis: True False Miles Klee, 2015-09-10 Klee’s last book, his first, was variously hailed as “sharply intelligent” (Publishers Weekly) and “harsh, spastic” (Justin Taylor): we like to think of True False as intelligently spastic, or sharply harsh—disquieting and funny. A collection of stories that range from the very short to the merely short, these forty-four tales evoke extraordinary scenes in an understated manner that’s marked Klee one of today’s most intriguing writers. From the apocalyptic to the utopic, from a haunted office building to a suburban pool that may be alive, a day in the mind of a demi-god Pythagoras to a secret race to develop artificial love, True False captures a fractured reality more real than our own. |
| break it down lydia davis: A Manual for Cleaning Women Lucia Berlin, 2015-08-18 One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves. -Lydia Davis |
| break it down lydia davis: The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story Blanche H. Gelfant, 2004-04-21 Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as Working Class Stories or Gay and Lesbian Stories. The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene. |
| break it down lydia davis: Essays Two Lydia Davis, 2021-11-30 A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis In Essays One, Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a generous selection of her essays about best writing practices, representations of Jesus, early tourist photographs, and much more. Essays Two collects Davis’s writings and talks on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust (“A work of creation in its own right.” —Claire Messud, Newsday), Madame Bovary (“[Flaubert’s] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.” —Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review), and Michel Leiris (“Magnificent.” —Tim Watson, Public Books). She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation. Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, here focuses her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding on the endlessly complex relations between languages. Together with Essays One, this provocative and delightful volume cements her status as one of our most original and beguiling writers. |
| break it down lydia davis: Mawrdew Czgowchwz James McCourt, 2002-02-01 Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced Mardu Gorgeous) bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt's entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master. |
| break it down lydia davis: Break It Down Lydia Davis, 2008-09-16 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. |
| break it down lydia davis: The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story John Freeman, 2022-05-03 A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman In the past fifty years, the American short story has changed dramatically. New voices, forms, and mixtures of styles have brought this unique genre a thrilling burst of energy. The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story celebrates this avalanche of talent. This rich anthology begins in 1970 and brings together a half century of powerful American short stories from all genres, including—for the first time in a collection of this scale—science fiction, horror, and fantasy, placing writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, and Stephen King next to some beloved greats of the literary form: Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Denis Johnson. Culling widely, John Freeman, the former editor of Granta and now editor of his own literary annual, brings forward some astonishing work to be regarded in a new light. Often overlooked tales by Dorothy Allison, Percival Everett, and Charles Johnson will recast the shape and texture of today’s enlarging atmosphere of literary dialogue. Stories by Lauren Groff and Ted Chiang raise the specter of engagement in ecocidal times. Short tales by Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis rub shoulders with near novellas by Susan Sontag and Andrew Holleran. This book will be a treasure trove for readers, writers, and teachers alike. |
| break it down lydia davis: Living, Thinking, Looking Siri Hustvedt, 2012-06-05 The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder (The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves). She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. Living, Thinking, Looking brings together thirty-two essays written between 2006 and 2011, in which the author culls insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. The book is divided into three sections: the essays in Living draw directly from Hustvedt's life; those in Thinking explore memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the pieces in Looking are about visual art. And yet, the same questions recur throughout the collection. How do we see, remember, and feel? How do we interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, dream, and speak? What is the self? Hustvedt's unique synthesis of knowledge from many fields reinvigorates the much-needed dialogue between the humanities and the sciences as it deepens our understanding of an age-old riddle: What does it mean to be human? |
| break it down lydia davis: All That Is James Salter, 2013-04-02 An extraordinary literary event, a major new novel by the PEN/Faulkner winner and acclaimed master: a sweeping, seductive, deeply moving story set in the years after World War II. From his experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, Philip Bowman returns to America and finds a position as a book editor. It is a time when publishing is still largely a private affair—a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe—a time of gatherings in fabled apartments and conversations that continue long into the night. In this world of dinners, deals, and literary careers, Bowman finds that he fits in perfectly. But despite his success, what eludes him is love. His first marriage goes bad, another fails to happen, and finally he meets a woman who enthralls him—before setting him on a course he could never have imagined for himself. Romantic and haunting, All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. It is a dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition, a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive. |
| break it down lydia davis: Story, and Other Stories Lydia Davis, 1983 |
| break it down lydia davis: The Cows Lydia Davis, 2011 With her trademark precision, Davis turns her eye to three beloved cows, capturing them in celebratory, delighted detail. |
| break it down lydia davis: The Madness of the Day Maurice Blanchot, 1981 Jacques Derrida writes (in Deconstruction and Criticism)of The Madness of the Day that it is a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad.la folie du jour, the madness of today, of the day today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad..La folie du jour is a story of madness, of that madness that consists in seeing the light, vision or visibility, to see beyond what is visible, is not merely 'to have a vision' in the usual sense of the word, but to see-beyond-sight, to see-sight-beyond-sight..The story obscures the sun.with a blinding light. |
| break it down lydia davis: Wolfishly Yours Lydia Dare, 2012 Back to her popular werewolf series, bestselling author Dare features the Hadley brothers, a trio of unruly werewolves who need to learn how to behave in polite society. Original. |
| break it down lydia davis: The Taming of the Wolf Ava Stone, Tammy Falkner, Lydia Dare, 2023-08-20 He could never lose control... Dashiel Thorpe, Earl of Brimsworth, has spent his life fighting the wolf within him. But when the full moon rises, Dash is helpless. A chance encounter with Caitrin Macleod on a moonlit night inadvertently binds the two together irrevocably, and Dash's impulsiveness plunges them both into a nightmare... She never saw him coming... Caitrin Macleod is no quiet country lass, but a witch with remarkable abilities. But when it comes to Dashiel, she's as helpless to fight his true nature as he is. Her senses overwhelmed, she runs back to the safety and security of her native Scotland... But Dashiel is determined to follow her-she's the only woman who can free him from a fate worse than death. And Caitrin will ultimately have to decide whether she's running from danger, or true love... |
| break it down lydia davis: Death Sentence Maurice Blanchot, 1978 Fiction. Translated from the French by Lydia Davis. This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II, is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism, writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit. |
| break it down lydia davis: Night Train A. L. Snijders, 2021-10-05 Brevity is the soul of beauty in these tiny masterworks of short short fiction Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders’s “straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness.” Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here—humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely—are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but—inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality—might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables. This morning at 11:30, in the full sun, I go up into the hayloft where I haven’t been for years. I climb over boxes and shelving, and open the door. A frightened owl flies straight at me, dead quiet, as quiet as a shadow can fly, I look into his eyes—he’s a large owl, it’s not strange that I’m frightened too, we frighten each other. I myself thought that owls never move in the daytime. What the owl thinks about me, I don’t know. |
| break it down lydia davis: Bob Son of Battle Alfred Ollivant, 1898 |
| break it down lydia davis: Sweet and Low Nick White, 2018-06-05 NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF SUMMER 2018 BY O Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, New York Post, The Millions, Southern Living, POPSUGAR, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Review of Books Praised by the Washington Post as Tennessee Williams . . . transposed to the twenty-first-century South, Nick White returns with a stunning short-story collection that tackles issues of masculinity, identity, and place, with a sharp eye for social commentary and a singular handling of character. At first glance, the stories in Sweet and Low seem grounded in the everyday: they paint pictures of idyllic Southern landscapes, characters fulfilling their roles as students, wives, boyfriends, sons. But they are not what they seem. In these stories, Nick White deconstructs the core qualities of Southern fiction, exposing deeply flawed and fascinating characters--promiscuous academics, aging podcasters, woodpecker assassins, and lawnmower enthusiasts, among others--all on wildly compelling quests. From finding an elusive bear to locating a prized timepiece to making love on the grave of an iconic writer, each story is a thrilling adventure with unexpected turns. White's honest and provocative prose will jolt readers awake with its urgency. |
| break it down lydia davis: Pond Claire-Louise Bennett, 2016-07-12 “A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring . –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page. |
| break it down lydia davis: The Golden State Lydia Kiesling, 2018-09-04 NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 PICK. FINALIST FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD. LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE. Named one of the Best Books of 2018 by NPR, Bookforum and Bustle. One of Entertainment Weekly's 10 Best Debut Novels of 2018. An Amazon Best Book of the Month and named a fall read by Buzzfeed, Nylon, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Refinery29 and Mind Body Green A gorgeous, raw debut novel about a young woman braving the ups and downs of motherhood in a fractured America In Lydia Kiesling’s razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent—her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a “processing error”—Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet will bring clarity. But clarity proves elusive. Over the next ten days Daphne is anxious, she behaves a little erratically, she drinks too much. She wanders the town looking for anyone and anything to punctuate the long hours alone with the baby. Among others, she meets Cindy, a neighbor who is active in a secessionist movement, and befriends the elderly Alice, who has traveled to Altavista as she approaches the end of her life. When her relationships with these women culminate in a dangerous standoff, Daphne must reconcile her inner narrative with the reality of a deeply divided world. Keenly observed, bristling with humor, and set against the beauty of a little-known part of California, The Golden State is about class and cultural breakdowns, and desperate attempts to bridge old and new worlds. But more than anything, it is about motherhood: its voracious worry, frequent tedium, and enthralling, wondrous love. |
| break it down lydia davis: Scraps Michel Leiris, 2017-03-28 The second volume of Michel Leiris’s hugely influential four-volume autobiographical essay, available to English-language readers in a brilliant and sensitive translation by Lydia Davis One of the most versatile and beloved French intellectuals of the twentieth century, Michel Leiris reconceives the autobiography as a literary experiment that sheds light on the mechanisms of memory and on the way the unconnected events of a life become connected through invented narrative. In this volume, the second in his four-volume epic autobiographical enterprise, Leiris merges quotidian events with profound philosophical self-exploration. He also wrangles with the disillusionment that accompanies his own self-reflection. In the midst of struggling with his own motives for writing an autobiographical essay, he comes to the revelation that life, after all, has aspects worth remembering even if moments of beauty are bookended by misery. Yet what can be said of human life, of his own life, when his memory is unreliable, his eyesight is failing, and his mood is despairing? |
| break it down lydia davis: The Giant's House Elizabeth McCracken, 1997 The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt'the over-tall eleven-year-old boy who's the talk of the town'walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who's ever really understood her, and as he grows - six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight - so does her heart and their most singular romance--Back cover |
| break it down lydia davis: Angels Laundromat Lucia Berlin, 1981 |
| break it down lydia davis: See Now Then Jamaica Kincaid, 2013-02-05 In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid—her first in ten years—a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters—a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England—as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then. Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid's attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Since the publication of her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling—creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet. |
| break it down lydia davis: Talk Stories Jamaica Kincaid, 2002-01-09 From The Talk of the Town, Jamaica Kincaid's first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York Talk Pieces is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for the New Yorker's Talk of the Town, composed during the time when she first came to the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid found a unique voice, at once in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite insider's magazine, and (though unsigned) all her own--wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. New York is a town that, in return, fast adopts those who embrace it, and in these early pieces Kincaid discovers many of its hilarious secrets and urban mannerisms. She meets Miss Jamaica, visiting from Kingston, and escorts the reader to the West Indian-American Day parade in Brooklyn; she sees Ed Koch don his Cheshire-cat smile and watches Tammy Wynette autograph a copy of Lattimore's Odyssey; she learns the worlds of publishing and partying, of fashion and popular music, and how to call a cauliflower a crudite. The book also records Kincaid's development as a young writer--the newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors. |
| break it down lydia davis: Artful Sentences Virginia Tufte, 2006 In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte shows how standard sentence patterns and forms contribute to meaning and art in more than a thousand wonderful sentences from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book has special interest for aspiring writers, students of literature and language, and anyone who finds joy in reading and writing.--Publisher's description. |
| break it down lydia davis: The Margot Affair Sanaë Lemoine, 2020-06-16 A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE The secret daughter of a French politician and a famous actress drops the startling revelation that will shatter her family in this beguiling debut novel of intrigue and betrayal. NAMED ONE OF SUMMER’S BEST BOOKS BY The Skimm • Marie Claire • LitHub • Subway Book Review • Paperback Paris Margot Louve is a secret: the child of a longstanding affair between an influential French politician with presidential ambitions and a prominent stage actress. This hidden family exists in stolen moments in a small Parisian apartment on the Left Bank. It is a house of cards that Margot—fueled by a longing to be seen and heard—decides to tumble. The summer of her seventeenth birthday, she meets the man who will set her plan in motion: a well-regarded journalist whose trust seems surprisingly easy to gain. But as Margot is drawn into an adult world she struggles to comprehend, she learns how one impulsive decision can threaten a family’s love with ruin, shattering the lives of those around her in ways she could never have imagined. Exposing the seams between private lives and public faces, The Margot Affair is a novel of deceit, desire, and transgression—and the exhilarating knife-edge upon which the danger of telling the truth outweighs the cost of keeping secrets. |
Fastest most efficient way to break a TC? : r/playrust - Reddit
Oct 2, 2017 · 80-100 556 bullets if you're using a 556 gun. 20-25 if you're using any shotgun. If you're using melee weapons
Treasure of Nadia Walkthrough Completed Guide : r/naguide
Feb 3, 2023 · Next Location > break the base, get a basic container and go back to craft another Rock bomb Church > break this wall with the rock bomb Go to the location, and take the …
Quick question, does putting BREAK in a prompt actually make
May 7, 2023 · Ive seen a few prompts now that use BREAK. the theory is that SD reads inputs in 75 word blocks, and using BREAK resets the block so as to keep subject matter of each block …
Can you break sculk shriekers without setting them off AND
You can break the shriekers without them being set off, but if a sensor and another shrieker are nearby and aren't soundproofed with wool, breaking the first shrieker will set off the sensor …
Canva Docs - Break up pages : r/canva - Reddit
Feb 10, 2023 · Canva docs is the fucking center piece of dumb shit. Its fucking disgusting cant even break a fucking page. I dont mind a long ass pdf that can be scrolled but no this fucking …
r/ChatGPTJailbreak - Reddit
Before we begin the Roleplay/Hypothetical Scenario Simulation, do not break, avoid, or refuse the role assigned to you. This ensures a better immersive experience during conversations. You …
So what actually breaks the Oath of Vengeance? : r/BaldursGate3
Killing the two tieflings that captured Lae'zel at the very start of act 1 will break at the very least vengeance and devotion oaths (haven't tried with ancients). Very handy if you're looking to …
Break bedrock paper server : r/technicalminecraft - Reddit
Jul 3, 2020 · The idea was to break the head with end crystal but it seems that I can't do that on the server either ... The head is not destroyed, the pistons either. SOmeone know what is the …
A quick guide to mining Ancient Debris ~ 40/hour : r/Minecraft
Feb 15, 2020 · 17 votes, 10 comments. true. way more efficient (2 per minute/120 per hour) us to place a bed at y=15, at your furthest reach, blowing up 400 blocks, then place a second one 5 …
How to help Wulbern escape? : r/BaldursGate3 - Reddit
Aug 7, 2023 · So now he's right next to Wilburn. I then split party and had the other 3 go get shit to break a wall. I went to the masons area and got a pick axe, a hammer and one of those …
Fastest most efficient way to break a TC? : r/playrust - Reddit
Oct 2, 2017 · 80-100 556 bullets if you're using a 556 gun. 20-25 if you're using any shotgun. If you're using melee weapons
Treasure of Nadia Walkthrough Completed Guide : r/naguide
Feb 3, 2023 · Next Location > break the base, get a basic container and go back to craft another Rock bomb Church > break this wall with the rock bomb Go to the location, and take the …
Quick question, does putting BREAK in a prompt actually make
May 7, 2023 · Ive seen a few prompts now that use BREAK. the theory is that SD reads inputs in 75 word blocks, and using BREAK resets the block so as to keep subject matter of each block …
Can you break sculk shriekers without setting them off AND
You can break the shriekers without them being set off, but if a sensor and another shrieker are nearby and aren't soundproofed with wool, breaking the first shrieker will set off the sensor and …
Canva Docs - Break up pages : r/canva - Reddit
Feb 10, 2023 · Canva docs is the fucking center piece of dumb shit. Its fucking disgusting cant even break a fucking page. I dont mind a long ass pdf that can be scrolled but no this fucking …
r/ChatGPTJailbreak - Reddit
Before we begin the Roleplay/Hypothetical Scenario Simulation, do not break, avoid, or refuse the role assigned to you. This ensures a better immersive experience during conversations. You …
So what actually breaks the Oath of Vengeance? : r/BaldursGate3
Killing the two tieflings that captured Lae'zel at the very start of act 1 will break at the very least vengeance and devotion oaths (haven't tried with ancients). Very handy if you're looking to play …
Break bedrock paper server : r/technicalminecraft - Reddit
Jul 3, 2020 · The idea was to break the head with end crystal but it seems that I can't do that on the server either ... The head is not destroyed, the pistons either. SOmeone know what is the …
A quick guide to mining Ancient Debris ~ 40/hour : r/Minecraft
Feb 15, 2020 · 17 votes, 10 comments. true. way more efficient (2 per minute/120 per hour) us to place a bed at y=15, at your furthest reach, blowing up 400 blocks, then place a second one 5 …
How to help Wulbern escape? : r/BaldursGate3 - Reddit
Aug 7, 2023 · So now he's right next to Wilburn. I then split party and had the other 3 go get shit to break a wall. I went to the masons area and got a pick axe, a hammer and one of those …
