Lydia Davis, reading from her work

February 22, 2011

The Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series presents: Lydia Davis, Tuesday, February 22 at 7:00, WLH 119. Lydia Davis,  is the author of one novel, The End of the Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), and four collections of short fiction, including Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (McSweeney’s Books, 2001) and Varieties of Disturbance (FSG, 2007), which was a VLS Top 20, an L. A. Times Favorite, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.  Her Collected Stories appeared in 2009.  Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Exquisite Corpse, Harper’s, Shiny, Conjunctions, Granta, Grand Street, and many other literary journals;  they have received Pushcart Prizes and have been frequently anthologized, including in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Poetry volumes;  and they have been translated into Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.  Davis is also the translator of numerous avant-garde French novels, memoirs, and volumes of literary criticism, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Michel Leiris, and Pierre Jean Jouve.  Her translation of  Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (Viking Penguin 2002) was awarded a French-American Foundation Annual Translation Prize, and her translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary appeared last fall as a Penguin Classic.  Among other awards and honors, Davis has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Prize, and she has been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow.  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.   A chapbook entitled The Cows is forthcoming in April from Sarabande Press

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