Lydia Davis, best known for short fiction (Can’t and Won’t) and translations (Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary), now publishes Essays One, a collection of nonfiction spanning five decades. “A body of work, probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom,” wrote James Wood. Hisham Matar, whose memoir The Return won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017, has now written A Month in Siena, a meditation on how art illuminates our own inner landscape. “He has the quality all historians—of the world and the self—most need: he knows how to stand back and let the past speak,” wrote Hilary Mantel.