This image is the cover for the book Can't and Won't

Can't and Won't

This story collection “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).

Lydia Davis’s stories may be literal one-liners, like the pithy “Bloomington.” Or they may be surprising investigations into mundane disruptions, such as “A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates.” 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.

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and four previousstory collections, the most recent of which, Varieties of Disturbance, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is alsothe acclaimed translator of Swann's Way (2003)and Madame Bovary (2010), both of which were awarded the French American Foundation Translation Prize. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, published in 2009, was described by James Wood in The New Yorker as a "grand cumulative achievement." She is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux