Lydia Davis, Short Story Writer, Novelist & Translator

LYDIA DAVIS, SHORT STORY WRITER,
NOVELIST & TRANSLATOR

“Lydia Davis is one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Oh, at last!—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.”—Grace Paley

“[Lydia Davis] blows the roof off . . . our assumptions about what constitutes short fiection.”—Dave Eggers

An American virtuoso, Lydia Davis is an innovator of the short story form. Acclaimed for their brevity (many are only one or two sentences long) and humor, her stylistic hallmarks of minimalist wordplay—with initial quick humor that then cause the reader to think again—offer up crisp twists on familiar themes. She is the author of four collections of short fiction, including Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Break It Down, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and a novel, The End of the Story. Her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories (edited by Annie Proulx) and The Best American Poetry, and has been published in literary journals ranging from The New Yorker and Harper's to Conjunctions and McSweeny’s. Her work has been translated into six languages.

Davis is also the translator of numerous avant-garde French novels, memoirs, and volumes of literary criticism, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and most recently Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, which received the French-American Foundation Annual Translation Prize. Among her other awards and honors, Davis was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translation, and in 2003 received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. In granting the ward the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis' work for showing "how language itself can entertain, how all that one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader's interest. . .Davis grants readers a glimpse of life's previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty." She is currently working on a new translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary for Viking Penguin. She lives in upstate New York, where she is on the faculty of SUNY Albany and a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute.

ABOUT VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In her fourth collection, Varieties of Disturbance, Lydia Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposed a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life. No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise.

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“The ticket was $600,” he says to himself, “and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That's $100 a shot. And each time it lasted maybe two or three hours so that would be anywhere from $33 to $50 an hour, which is expensive.” On the other hand, he goes on, he enjoyed his lover's company every waking hour—roughly 16 hours a day, and “sixteen into a hundred would be $6 an hour, which isn't too much. ”
—from Break It Down

In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowed in the kitchen, the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.”
—A House Besieged (entire)

I have been hearing what my mother says for over forty years and I have been hearing what my husband says for only about five years, and I have often thought she was right and he was not right, but now more often I think he is right, especially on a day like today when I have just had a long conversation on the phone with my mother about my brother and my father and then a shorter conversation on the phone with my husband about the conversation I had with my mother.
—from Varieties of Disturbance