Essays One

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 about her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust (On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles).

“A work of creation in its own right.”  - Claire Messud, Newsday

Lydia Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, here focuses on her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding 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.