Lydia Davis
April 24–25, 2017
- Discussion: Streaming video, MP3 audio
Bio
Lydia Davis is a short story writer, novelist and translator, widely regarded as a master of the short story and known for her “flash fiction” pieces, some of which may be a paragraph or a sentence long. She has published six short story collections, most recently Can’t and Won’t (2014), and one novel, The End of the Story (1995), along with a beautiful collected volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which collects all of her short fiction from 1986’s Break it Down to 2007’s National Book Award-nominated Varieties of Disturbance. She has also published numerous widely-acclaimed translations of French literature and philosophy into English, including works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, and Gustave Flaubert. Davis has won many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, and the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. Davis received her BA from Barnard College, and is a professor of english and writer-in-residence at SUNY Albany.