Davis, Lydia

Lydia Davis, (born July 15, 1947, Northampton, Massachusetts, U.S.), American writer noted for her idiosyncratic and extremely short stories often characterized by vivid observations of mostly mundane and routine occurrences.

Davis grew up surrounded by readers, writers, and teachers. Her father, Robert Gorham Davis, taught English literature at Smith College when she was young. Her mother was a teacher and a writer. At age 10 Davis moved with her parents to New York City, when her father took a teaching position at Columbia University. Beginning in 1965, Davis attended Barnard College, and there during her freshman year she met writer Paul Auster, to whom she was briefly married (1974–78). In their mid-twenties Davis and Auster lived in Paris and the south of France, where they earned a meagre living by doing translation work. Translating remained a primary source of revenue for Davis, who counted books by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Gustave Flaubert, and Pierre-Jean Jouve among her many translations. Her versions of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2003) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2010) were published to great critical acclaim.

Davis’s unique brand of short stories began to take shape after she read American prose poet Russell Edson. Until then she had been trying to write more traditionally structured short stories but had been unsuccessful. Davis credited Edson with giving her carte blanche to write however she wished. That newfound freedom opened the door to radical experimentation with language and writing conventions. She found her niche in elevating the banal into thought-provoking short narratives. Her stories can be so brief, sometimes just one line, that they have been variously referred to as poems, observations, parables, jokes, aphorisms, and anecdotes.

Though acclaimed early on for her translations, Davis waited much longer to garner critical attention for her fiction. Her first story collection, The Thirteenth Woman, and Other Stories, was published in 1976, but it was not until 11 years later—with Break It Down (1986), her fourth collection—that she was a finalist for a significant literary prize, the 1987 PEN/Hemingway Award. She subsequently gained a strong following, particularly among writers and literary critics, and some of her earlier collections were reissued. She is credited with having influenced contemporary authors Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Miranda July, and David Foster Wallace.

Davis’s The Collected Stories, a compilation of stories written over 30 years, was published in 2009, and she published a book of new short stories, Can’t and Won’t, in 2014. In addition to stories, she published a novel, The End of the Story (1995), in which a writer tries to make sense of a breakup with a boyfriend by writing a novel about it. The narrative incorporates elements from Davis’s short story “Story.” Essays One (2019) and Essays Two (2021) are collections of her nonfiction.

Davis was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translations (1999), received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2003), and won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit medal and the Man Booker International Prize (both 2013).