Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis
Occupation	writer
Nationality	American
Period	1980s-
Genres	short story, novel, essay
Influences Beckett, Proust, Russell Edson
Influenced Dave Eggers, Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso

Lydia Davis (born 1947) is a contemporary American writer noted for her short stories. Davis is also a French translator, and has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Proust's Swann’s Way and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published as a single volume in 2010.

Life

She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to artist Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY and Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University.

She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection was Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. "The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis", published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009, contains all her stories to date.

Her stories are acclaimed for their brevity and humour. Many are only one or two sentences. Some of her stories are considered poetry or somewhere between philosophy, poetry and short story. Three contemporary authors share the distinction of appearing in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry series: Lydia Davis, Stuart Dybek, and Alice Fulton.

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

In October 2003 Davis received a MacArthur Fellowship. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Reception and influence

Davis has been described as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention." Author Carmela Ciuraro has written of Davis's stories: "Anyone hung up on the conventional (and often predictable) beginning-middle-end narrative format may be disappointed by the wild peregrinations found here. Yet these stories are endearing and rich in their own way, and can be counted on without exception to offer the element of surprise." Author Tao Lin has repeatedly cited her work as inspiration for his own work, specifically her first novel as inspiration for his second novel.

Awards

• St. Martin, a short story that first appeared in Grand Street, was included in The Best American Short Stories 1997.
• 2003 MacArthur Fellows Program
• 2007 National Book Award Fiction Finalist, for Varieties of Disturbance: Stories
• PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist, for Break It Down

Selected works

• The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, Living Hand, (1976)
• Sketches for a Life of Wassilly. Station Hill Press. 1981. ISBN 9780930794453. 
• Story and Other Stories. The Figures. 1985. ISBN 9780935724172. 
• Break It Down. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1986. ISBN 0374116539. 
• The End of the Story. Farrar Straus & Giroux. 1994. ISBN 9780374148317.  (novel)
• Almost No Memory. Farrar Straus & Giroux. 1997. ISBN 9780374102814. 
• Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. McSweeney's. 2001. ISBN 9780970335593. 
• Varieties of Disturbance. Farrar Straus and Giroux. May 15, 2007. ISBN 9780374281731. 
• The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2009. ISBN 9780374270605. 

Anthologies

• Charles Wright, David Lehman, ed. (2008). "Men". The Best American Poetry 2008. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780743299756. http://books.google.com/?id=xIQtFKnRcpcC&pg=PT48&dq=Lydia+Davis&q=Lydia%20Davis. 
• Robert Hass, David Lehman, ed. (2001). "A Mown Lawn". The Best American Poetry 2001. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780743203845. http://books.google.com/?id=yeyJ_UMIlyYC&pg=PA67&dq=Lydia+Davis&q=Lydia%20Davis. 
• E. Annie Proulx, Katrina Kenison, ed. (1997). "St. Martin". The Best American Short Stories 1997. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780395798655. 
• Bill Henderson, ed. (1989). The Pushcart prize: best of the small presses. Pushcart Press. ISBN 9780916366582. 

Translations

• Marcel Proust (2004). Lydia Davis, Christopher Prendergast. ed. Swann's Way. Translator Lydia Davis. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780142437964. 
• Vivant Denon (2009). Peter Brooks. ed. No Tomorrow. Translator Lydia Davis. New York Review of Books. ISBN 9781590173268. 
• Gustav Flaubert (2010). Lydia Davis. ed. Madame Bovary. Translator Lydia Davis. Viking Adult. ISBN 978-0670022076. 

Reviews

Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century French libertine literature, a book to set beside Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that where Laclos's icy novel is one of hellish depravity, Denon's ravishing novella is a paradisal diversion.

External links

• The Believer Interview
• Essays, Stories, Interviews and readings
• Samuel Johnson is indignant - TMO meets Lydia Davis
• Interview @ BOMB
• "Q&A with Lydia Davis", The Boston Globe, Kate Bolick, April 29, 2007
• "Mothers Who Think", Salon, June 1997
• "2007 National Book Award Fiction Finalist Interview With Lydia Davis", National Book Foundation
• "Structure Is Structure", Poetry Foundation
• "A Conversation with Lydia Davis", Web Del Sol
• Audio-files @ PENNsound listen to Lydia Davis read from her work
• Author Page at Internationales Literatufestival Berlin Davis was a Guest of the ILB ( Internationales Literatufestival Berlin / Germany ) in 2001
• "Lydia Davis", Penn Sound