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  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241205464
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

The End of the Story




The first and only novel by one of the world's greatest short story writers

Mislabeled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780241205464
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

About the author

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction, the latest of which is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. She is also the translator of numerous works from the French by, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

Also by Lydia Davis

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Praise for The End of the Story

Unputdownable . . . [The End of the Story] freed me from the preconceptions I had then about the way novels were supposed to work . . . it deals with the heat and the thirst of infatuation, the desperation to find an end to the torment when a desired object won't reciprocate

Olivia Sudjic, Observer, 'Summer Reads 2023'

Can't and Won't is the most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years

John Freeman, Boston Globe

Lydia Davis's short stories are perfected economies, witty devices, precision-made, primed to release intelligence, philosophy, hilarity. They celebrate the thinking universe while they redefine the possibilities of the form. There is no other writer quite like her

Ali Smith

Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. . . one of the best writers in America

Colm Tóibín, Daily Telegraph

Her work is exquisite, finely wrought and devastating. . . Read her now!

A. M. Homes

Extraordinary

Newsday

Breathtakingly elegant

Details

Brilliant

New Yorker