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Essays

Brief Description
A crystalline collection of literary essays from the Man Booker International Prize-winning author of Can't and Won't. Lydia Davis's writing is a masterclass in control: wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed,... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$3000
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Releases 6th October 2026 (Approx. Date) Pre-order  "Essays" now to secure your copy from our first shipment

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A crystalline collection of literary essays from the Man Booker International Prize-winning author of Can't and Won't.

Lydia Davis's writing is a masterclass in control: wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating as her critically acclaimed short fiction.

Ranging across her many creative influences, including Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin and Joan Mitchell, she returns again and again to her own writing process, joyfully interrogating the limits of literature and the ways in which we can challenge and reinvent it.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780241985458

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 02 July 2026

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 33.0mm

Width: 132.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 694g

Pages: 528

About the Author

Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

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