The End of the Story - by Lydia Davis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair--such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor 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.

Review Quotes

"Constructed in brutally perceptive and dazzlingly revelatory prose, this is a stunning work."--Booklist

"This breathtakingly elegant and unsentimental first novel is about passion, regret, and memory: about the psychology of the spot where recollection and loss intersect."--Details

"Extraordinary...the risks Davis takes by depriving herself of a traditional structure are enormous."--Newsday

"[The End of the Story] succeeds in...giving the reader both the story and the painful work that goes into its making, and as such it is not only beautiful, but an extraordinary and very modern achievement."--The New York Observer

About the Author

LYDIA DAVIS is the author of one novel and five story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and most recently, Can't and Won't. She is also 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.