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A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her a magician of self-consciousness, while Rick Moody hails her as the best prose stylist in America. And for Claire Messud, Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive. Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis's gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades. In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote's painting, and from the Shepherd's Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today.

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"Bringing the experience of nearly four decades of theater, film, and television acting to audiobook narration, AudioFile Earphones Award winner Janet Metzger has deftly interpreted the many-faceted characters of Southern fiction writers such as Sarah Addison Allen, Patti Callahan Henry, and Kristy Woodson Harvey. As an award-winning documentary narrator and a master teacher at Emory University School of Law, where she teaches storytelling and persuasion, Janet brings both warmth and authority to nonfiction as well. Whether she is narrating a Southern romance, a heroine's journey, or an innovative take on business, Janet's warm and inviting voice will draw you into the story. Lydia Davis was awarded the 2003 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of such modern writers as Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris. She is the author of a novel, The End of the Story, and several volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance, a National Book Award finalist, and Can't and Won't, a New York Times bestseller. In 2009 her stories were brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which was called ""a grand cumulative achievement"" and ""one of the great, strange American literary contributions"" by James Wood in The New Yorker and ""one of the great books in recent literature"" by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books. A MacArthur Fellow, Davis lives near Albany, New York."

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