A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis
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 selection of her essays for the first time in 2019 with Essays One. Now, Davis continues her non-fiction project with Essays Two.
This edition will, for the first time, collect Lydia Davis's essays and talks on the art of translation, the experience of translating Proust, Flaubert and Michel Leiris, learning a foreign language through reading, and an extended immersion in the city of Arles.
Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her fiction and finalist for the National Book Award, showcases her sharp literary mind and invaluable insight in this new collection of her nonfiction works.
"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, The New York Times Book Review
"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 ."
