Lydia Davis (b.1947) is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator. She is best known for her distinctive “shortest of short stories”—concise stories often characterized by vivid observations of mundane and routine incidents.
Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, Davis studied at Barnard College. She teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Albany.
Davis has been labeled “the master of a literary form largely of her own invention.” Her short stories are usually less than three pages long—some of which run to just a paragraph or a sentence.
Davis has published six anthologies of fiction, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976,) Break It Down (1986,) Varieties of Disturbance (2007,) and Can’t and Won’t (2013.)
Davis has produced several new French literary classics translations, including Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. She has also translated Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Michel Leiris, Pierre Jean Jouve, and other French writers and the Dutch writer A.L. Snijders.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Lydia Davis
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
—Lydia Davis
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