Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles

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 on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust ("A work of creation in its own right." --Claire Messud, Newsday), Madame Bovary ("[Flaubert's] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves." --Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review), and Michel Leiris ("Magnificent." --Tim Watson, Public Books). She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation.

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

Author: Lydia Davis
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 11/30/2021
Pages: 592
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 7.60h x 5.10w x 2.20d
ISBN: 9780374148867

About the Author
Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, and art. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and the author of many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award, and, in 2014, Can't and Won't. Davis is the acclaimed translator of Swann's Way and Madame Bovary, both of which were awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis 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.