Lydia Davis / The Mother
Lydia Davis by Francine Prose / Interview
Lidya Davis by Sarah Manguso / Interview
Lydia Davis / Five Stories
Lydia / What I am reading
Lydia Davis / My style is a reaction to Proust's long senteces
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Lydia Davis by Francine Prose / Interview
Lidya Davis by Sarah Manguso / Interview
Lydia Davis / Five Stories
Lydia / What I am reading
Lydia Davis / My style is a reaction to Proust's long senteces
Lydia Davis
(1947)
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 2009.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published as a single volume in 2009.
Life
Davis was born in Northampton, MA. 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 was a Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University in 2012.
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 & Giroux in 2007. "The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis", published by Farrar Straus & 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. Lydia was a distinguished speaker at the 2004 & NOW Festival at the University of Notre Dame.
Reception and influence
Davis has been described as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention." Author Carmela Ciuraru 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 Fwllows Program
- 2007 National Book Award Fiction Finalist, for Varieties of Disturbance: Stories
- PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist, for Break It Down
She is also taller than Virginia Woolf.
I love her minimism. It takes talent, real talent,
to say so much in so few words.
BOOKS review of “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.” At nine pages, “Glenn Gould,” a monologue by Lydia Davis, is longer than most of her work, which are typically between three and four; many are as brief as a paragraph, or a sentence. Most of them are not conventional “stories”—they usually feature people who are unnamed, are often set in unnamed towns or states, and lack the formal comportment of a story that opens, rises, and closes. There is no gratuitous bulk, no “realistic” wadding. Davis’s pieces, often narrated by a woman, sometimes apparently by the writer, are closer to soliloquy than to the story; they are essayist poems—small curiosity boxes rather than large canvasses. One can read a large portion of Davis’s work, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view—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. “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30) will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal. Davis’s tone is dancelike, insouciant, and often very funny. Her work contains many piquant details. The smallest pieces are sometimes sweet jeux d’esprit, and are like the captions you might encounter at a contemporary art installation. What deepens the work, and moves it from game to drama, is that this brisk, almost naïve tone is often revealed to be a mask, a public fiction, behind which a person is flinching. What is omitted or suppressed becomes highly charged, and the hunger strike of the spare, lucid words on the page can take on a desperate aspect. Selfishness, in every sense of the word, is Davis’s real theme. Her work raises the interesting question of how much a fictional story about a fictional self can shed, and still remain a story about a vivid self. The answer is almost everything. The stories assemble an intellectual and emotional autobiography; a sensibility is strongly confessed. “We know we are very special,” Davis writes in “Special”: “Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?” This restless business of “trying to find out” is precisely what constitutes the specialty of this writer.
Lydia Davis
The Colletected Stories of Lydia Davis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Selected works
- The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, Living Hand, (1976)
- Sketches for a Life of Wassilly. Station Hill Press. 1981.
- Story and Other Stories. The Figures. 1985.
- Break It Down. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1986.
- The End of the Story. Farrar Straus & Giroux. 1994. (novel)
- Almost No Memory. Farrar Straus & Giroux. 1997.
- Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. McSweeney's. 2001.
- Varieties of Disturbance. Farrar Straus and Giroux. May 15, 2007.
- The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2009. .
Anthologies
- Charles Wright, David Lehman, ed. (2008). "Men". The Best American Poetry 2008. Simon and Schuster.
- Robert Hass, David Lehman, ed. (2001). "A Mown Lawn". The Best American Poetry 2001. Simon and Schuster.
- E. Annie Proulx, Katrina Kenison, ed. (1997). "St. Martin". The Best American Short Stories 1997. Houghton Mifflin.
- Bill Henderson, ed. (1989). The Pushcart prize: best of the small presses. Pushcart Press.
Translations
- Marcel Proust (2004). Lydia Davis, Christopher Prendergast. ed. Swann's Way. Translator Lydia Davis. Penguin Books.
- Vivant Denon (2009). Peter Brooks. ed. No Tomorrow. Translator Lydia Davis. New York Review of Books.
- Gustave Flaubert (2010). Lydia Davis. ed. Madame Bovary. Translator Lydia Davis. Viking Adult.
Wikipedia
The New Yorker
The New Yorker
