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First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1995 First published in Great Britain by Serpent’s Tail 1996 Published in Penguin Books 2015
The author wishes to thank the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry for their generous support.
ISBN: 978-0-241-20546-4
Contents
The End of the Story
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THE END OF THE STORY
‘Utterly compelling … a remarkably original and successful novel’ London Review of Books
‘Astonishing … presents a singular portrait of how memory preserves and distorts the painful terrain of failed love’ Elle
‘Extraordinary … a brilliantly assembled novel’ Newsday
‘Passion and regret, writing and revision, the impossibility of describing, or even remembering, love – these themes animate Lydia Davis’s brilliantly original, funny, wise and quietly brave new novel’ Francine Prose
‘A brave, wildly unconventional and thought-provoking novel written with a wittily restrained intensity’ Time Out
‘A fascinating, piercingly told, smouldering tale’ Charles Bernstein
‘Brilliant. No contemporary writer has so bravely explored the grisaille of solitude, boredom, pique and discontent in the midst of desire, or the severe elegance of a thinking woman’ Village Voice
‘Constructed in brutally perceptive and dazzlingly revelatory prose, this is a stunning work’ Booklist
‘The disintegration of a short-lived affair and its aftermath recounted in mesmerizing detail. A cool, beautifully written first novel’ Marie Claire
‘An excruciatingly detailed anatomy of a relationship that is engaging, self-mocking and scrupulously truthful’ Times Literary Supplement
The End of the Story
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories; one novel, The End of the Story; and seven short-story collections, the most recent of which is Can’t and Won’t. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
THE BEGINNING
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