Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis (born July 15, 1947) is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, poet, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes very short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Early life and education Davis was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1947. She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis, a critic and professor of English, and Hope Hale Davis, a short-story writer, teacher, and memoirist. Davis initially studied music, first piano, then violin, which was her first love. On becoming a writer, Davis has said, "I was probably always headed to being a writer, even though that wasn't my first love. I guess I must have always wanted to write in some part of me or I wouldn't have done it." From fifth to eighth grade, she attended The Brearley School in New York City. She attended high school at The Putney School, graduating in 1965. She studied at Barnard College, and at that time she mostly wrote poetry. Auster and Davis later divorced; Davis is now married to the artist Alan Cote, with whom she has another son, Theo Cote. She is a professor emerita at the University at Albany, SUNY, and was a Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University in 2012.

Career Davis has published six collections of fiction, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her most recent collections were Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, and Can't and Won't (2013). The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009) contains all her short fiction up to 2008.

Davis has also translated Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Butor, Michel Leiris, Pierre Jean Jouve and other French writers,

Reception and influence

Davis has been described as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention." Some of her "stories" are only one or two sentences. Davis has compared these works to skyscrapers in the sense that they are surrounded by an imposing blank expanse. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael LaPointe goes so far as to say while "Lydia Davis did not invent flash fiction... she is so far and away its most eminent contemporary practitioner". Of contemporary authors, only Davis, Stuart Dybek, and Alice Fulton share the distinction of appearing in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry series.

In October 2003, Davis received a MacArthur Fellowship. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Davis was a distinguished speaker at the 2004 &NOW Festival at the University of Notre Dame. Davis was announced as the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize on May 22, 2013. The official announcement of Davis's award on the Man Booker Prize website described her work as having "the brevity and precision of poetry." The judging panel chair Christopher Ricks commented, "There is vigilance to her stories, and great imaginative attention. Vigilance as how to realise things down to the very word or syllable; vigilance as to everybody's impure motives and illusions of feeling." Davis won £60,000 as part of the biennial award. She is widely considered "one of the most original minds in American fiction today."

Davis declined to sell her book Our Strangers on Amazon.

Her collection The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was listed as one of the "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" by The New York Times.

Awards 1986 PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, for Break It Down "Men," a short-short story that first appeared in 32 Poems, was included in The Best American Poetry 2008 2013 American Academy of Arts and Letters' Award of Merit Medal 2013 Philolexian Society Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement 2013 Man Booker International Prize

Selected works The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, Living Hand, 1976 (republished in Can't and Won't) Lydia Davis: Documenta Series 078. Hatje Cantz. 2012. (co-written with Eliot Weinberger)

Into the Weeds. Yale University Press, 2025.

Anthologies

Selected translations

Attilio Colombo (1979). Fantastic Photographs. Translator Lydia Davis. Pantheon Books.

(Davis translated the 19-page afterword by Maurice Blanchot, "Joubert et l'espace.") Conrad Detrez (1984). A Weed for Burning. Translator Lydia Davis. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Michel Butor (1986). The Spirit of Mediterranean Places. Translator Lydia Davis. Marlboro Press. Conrad Detrez (1986). Zone of Fire. Translator Lydia Davis. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Maurice Blanchot (1987). The Last Man. Translator Lydia Davis. Columbia University Press.

Michel Leiris (1989). Brisées: Broken Branches. Translator Lydia Davis. North Point Press.

Michel Leiris (1991) The Rules of the Game: Scratches. Translator Lydia Davis. Paragon House. Pierre Jean Jouve (1993). Hélène. Translator Lydia Davis. Marlboro Press. Michel Leiris (1997) The Rules of the Game: Scraps. Translator Lydia Davis. Johns Hopkins University Press. Michel Leiris (2017) The Rules of the Game: Fibrils. Translator Lydia Davis. Yale University Press.

Snijders, A.L. (2021). Night Train. Translated by Lydia Davis. New Directions.