Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is the author of seven collections of stories, one novel and two books of non-fiction, Essays One and Essays Two. She is also the translator of a number of works from French and other languages, including Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. A new collection of short fiction, Our Strangers, will be appearing this autumn from Bookshop Editions and Canongate. In honour of her literary achievements, she was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
Lydia Davis on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | Issue 164
Journal Excerpts 1997–1999
Lydia Davis
‘gormandizing, gluttonous, lickerish, guttling’
Excerpts from Lydia Davis’s diary.
Fiction | Issue 151
Learning to Sing
Lydia Davis
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
Fiction | Issue 115
The Dreadful Mucamas
Lydia Davis
‘We do not believe they are sincerely trying to please us.’
Essays & Memoir | Issue 140
Chère Madame
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust’s letters to his neighbour, translated from the French by Lydia Davis.
Fiction | Issue 126
Spelling Problem
Lydia Davis
‘A woman from Barnard College calls me and asks if I would please spell ‘hemorrhaging’ for her.’
Essays & Memoir | Issue 126
The Furnace
Lydia Davis
‘My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother’.