Can't and Won't

Can't and Won't cover design: Charlotte Strick, copyright 2014. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Many of Lydia Davis's stories are brief and formally innovative. They're categorized in various ways--flash fiction, anecdotes, essays, aphorisms--and often compared to poetry with their construction, punctuation, and line breaks. "My dedication is really to prose," Lydia says. "I cross the line into poetry, but I would have had to be writing poetry from the beginning and reading mostly poetry to consider myself a poet. My lineage is with prose, fiction." Her most recent collection of short stories is Can't and Won't (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). 

Lydia teaches at SUNY Albany and is a translator of Proust and Flaubert. She's the author of one novel and seven story collections, and is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

Her short shorts are compressed into just one or two lines, "Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before," runs "Bloomington." Mundane, everyday routine details are a primary focus in the stories, taken out of their normal context and fictionalized with absurd and humorous escalations of irritations, conflicts, and slights. In "The Language of the Telephone Company" she exploits corporate copy as found text, "The trouble you reported recently / is now working properly." The most extended piece in Can't and Won't is 29 pages long. 

The 122 stories in the collection consist of observations and musings, without narrative scenes between characters, and the characters are often only pronouns caught up in minor activities and events or in contemplation and memory. Some are tagged with the word dream and are selected fragments of Lydia's "night dreams and dreamlike waking experiences," as well as those of her friends. There are stories from Flaubert, anecdotes drawn from the novelist's letters, likely encountered during her translation of Madame Bovary.

The part about the cover: 

Charlotte Strick is the designer of the Can't and Won't cover, which made The New York Times Book Review's list of best book covers of 2014. She is the co-director of Strick&Williams, a design studio focused on the arts, education, publishing, and nonprofits, the art editor of the Paris Review, and former art director of the trade paperback line at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A graduate of Parsons School of Design, she lives in Brooklyn. View more of her work on her website. 

"Can't and Won't is the fourth book by Lydia Davis that I've had the privilege of working on," says Charlotte. "I've become a bigger fan with each new title, not just because of Lydia's original way of telling a very short story (sometimes just one sentence) but also because her particular use of language offers up so many little gifts for her readers--and for this devoted book jacket designer."

Commenting on what defines a jacket design as successful, she adds, "A good cover should be visually arresting and true to the feel and content of the book; it should also, ideally, look like nothing else."

An excerpt from "I'm Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable."

A man is coughing during the concert.

The shower is a little too cold.

There's a long line at the shipping counter.

They're quarreling again.

I didn't get two seats to myself on the train.

My fork is too short.

She has parked her Mercedes across the end of my driveway.

The seam in the toe of my sock is twisted.

I don't look forward very much to that sandwich.

Now that the leaves are off the trees, we can see the neighbor's new deck.

The clock is ticking very loudly.