Lydia Davis Biography

Lydia Davis, an accomplished fiction writer and translator, is known in literary circles for her highly imaginative short stories that are incredibly brief. She earned one of the 25 MacArthur Foundation Genius Awards in the fall of 2003. The MacArthur Foundation complimented Davis' work for demonstrating how language can entertain, and how all of what one word conveys and leaves unsaid can keep a reader's attention. Davis shows readers previously unseen aspects of existence, offering fresh sources of philosophical understanding and beauty. Varieties of Disturbance (May 2007), Davis' most recent collection, was featured on the front cover of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Elle magazine commended her book Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001) for its highly brilliant, tremendously amusing stories connected by visionary, philosophical, comedic writing that was part Gertrude Stein, half Simone Weil, and entirely Lydia Davis. Davis is also a well-known English-language translator of French literature. For her novels and excellent translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor, and others, the French government made her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Davis just released a fresh translation of Marcel Proust's masterwork, Swann's Way (2003), the first book of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (the first in more than 80 years). Swann's Way is widely recognized as one of the most important literary masterpieces of the twentieth century. It is a narrative about infancy and sexual jealousy set in late-nineteenth-century France. The new translation, according to the London Sunday Telegraph, is "a success" that will "introduce this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking globe." What shines in this new edition is the purity of language and faithfulness to the cambers of Proust's prose Davis translation is superb, Frank Wynne said for the Irish Times. Almost No Memory (stories, 1997), The End of the Story (novel, 1995), Break It Down (stories, 1986), Story and Other Stories (1983), and The Thirteenth Woman (novel, 1995) are among Davis' prior works (stories, 1976). Davis initially gained critical acclaim with her collection of short tales, Break It Down, which was named a PEN/Hemingway Award nominee. Davis won the coveted Whiting Writers Award in 1988 as a result of the book's favorable critical reaction.

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