Lydia Davis (born July 15, 1947) is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes very short stories.[1][2][3] 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.[4] 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.[5] Davis initially "studied music—first piano, then violin—which was her first love."[6] 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."[7] 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.[6]
In 1974, Davis married Paul Auster, with whom she had a son named Daniel (1977–2022).[5][8] Auster and Davis later divorced; Davis is now married to the artist Alan Cote,[9] with whom she has another son, Theo Cote.
She is a professor of creative writing at the University at Albany, SUNY,[9] and was a Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University in 2012.[10]
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 been described as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention."[11] 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.[12] Michael LaPointe writing in the LA Review of Books 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".[3] Her "distinctive voice has never been easy to fit into conventional categories", writes Kasia Boddy in the Columbia Companion to the 21st Century Short Story. Boddy writes: "Davis's parables are most successful when they examine the problems of communication between men and women, and the strategies each uses to interpret the other's words and actions."[13] 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.[14] She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.[15] Davis was a distinguished speaker at the 2004 &NOW Festival at the University of Notre Dame.[16] Davis was announced as the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize on 22 May 2013.[17] 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."[18] Davis won £60,000 as part of the biennial award.[19] She is widely considered "one of the most original minds in American fiction today."[20]
She declined to sell her book, Our Strangers, on Amazon.[21][22]
Awards
1986 PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, for Break It Down[4]
Charles Wright; David Lehman, eds. (2008). "Men". The Best American Poetry 2008. Simon and Schuster. ISBN978-0-7432-9975-6.
Selected translations
Jean Chesneaux, Françoise Le Barbier, Marie-Claire Bergère (1977). China from the 1911 Revolution to Liberation. Translators Paul Auster and Lydia Davis. Pantheon Books.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Claude Nori (1979). French Photography, from Its Origins to the Present. Translator Lydia Davis. Pantheon Press.
Maurice Blanchot (1981). P. Adams Sitney (ed.). The Gaze of Orpheus, and Other Literary Essays. Translator Lydia Davis. Station Hill Press. ISBN978-0930794378.
Joseph Joubert (1983). Paul Auster (ed.). The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Translator Paul Auster. North Point Press. ISBN0865471088. (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.
Gustave Flaubert (2010). Lydia Davis (ed.). Madame Bovary. Translated by Lydia Davis. Viking Adult. ISBN978-0-670-02207-6.
Ollivant, Alfred (2014). Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir. New York Review Children's Collection. Translated by Lydia Davis. ISBN9781590177297.
Snijders, A.L. (2016). Grasses and Trees. Translated by Lydia Davis. AFDH. ISBN9789072603586.
^Boddy, Kasia (2000-01-01). "Lydia Davis (1947– )". In Gelfant, Blanche (ed.). The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. Columbia University Press. pp. 219–223. doi:10.7312/gelf11098. ISBN9780231504959. JSTOR10.7312/gelf11098.42.
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