Lydia Davis returns with a timeless collection of essays on literature and language.

'Precise, concentrated, lyrical. No one writes like Lydia Davis, and everyone should read her' Hanif Kureishi

'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust' Ali Smith

Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays. Now, she continues the project with Essays Two, focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles.

Every essay in this book is a revelation.

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.

Reviews
We come away from Essays Two with renewed respect for a writer whose grasp of languages is profound, and whose capacity to shape-shift from one to another is quite exceptional * Times Literary Supplement *
Whatever the topic, Davis is always superb company: erudite, adventurous, surprising . . . Davis extracts endless thrills from the painstaking process [of translation]. Her essays do a beautiful job of transmitting that satisfaction to the reader . . . A book that contains an incredible amount of life-enhancing morsels -- Molly Young * New York Times *
[Essays Two is] a guide to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self * The Boston Globe *
When Davis breaks down the work of writing, she can be very funny, often at her own expense . . . The pieces in Essays Two brim with daring experiments . . . There is an element of knight-errantry, quest, romantic fatalism as she pursues the elusive foreign language, and often a distant century -- Ange Mlinko * London Review of Books *
As a translator, Davis is known for fidelity, clarity, and, in the case of Proust, decluttering . . . Yet the collection is not, mostly, about problems with other people's translations but the process of working on her own - a kind of shop talk we're allowed to listen in on . . . Davis once said in an interview that she would find it 'almost morally or ethically wrong' to deliberately impose her own style on a translation. Her scrupulousness is, perhaps, a counterbalance to the translator's power, and to the peremptory instinct that prompts translation in the first place -- Elaine Blair * New York Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9781405992657
Author Lydia Davis
Format Paperback
Page Count 592
Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 464g
Dimensions(mm) 199mm * 131mm * 38mm