DAVIS, Lydia.

£850 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories. First edition, number 311 of 500 copies only, here with the ownership inscription of the poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This work marked the debut of a contemporary virtuoso of the short story. Davis has since become highly regarded as a prose stylist: she is, through her singular brevity, "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention" (Teicher).In her first collection, Davis "draws upon the tradition of Eastern European folk tale and Kafkaesque parable... The 'misunderstanding' inherent in ordinary language is the subject that animates Davis's own remarkable fiction. The word as physical presence: in Davis's work, vocabulary is stripped down to a bare minimum, words - frequently function words and pronouns - being put to the test" (Perloff, pp. 205-6). Equally esteemed for her short stories and her acclaimed translations of figures such as Proust and Flaubert, Davis received the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.It was published under the Living Hand imprint, edited by Davis and her then-partner Paul Auster.

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