Biographies and Photos

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is the author of a novel, The End of the Story (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), and three collections of short fiction, Break It Down (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), Almost No Memory (FSG, 1997), and Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (McSweeney's Books, 2001). Another collection of her stories will be appearing from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in the Spring of 2007. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Exquisite Corpse, Harper's, Shiny, Conjunctions, Granta, Grand Street, and many other literary journals, as well as anthologies such as Best American Short Stories and Best American Poetry, and has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, and Farsi. Davis is also the translator of a number of 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 (Viking! Penguin 2002), 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. She lives in upstate New York, where she is on the faculty of SUNY Albany and the New York State Writers Institute.