Lydia Davis





Lydia Davis

Author profile


born
January 01, 1947

gender
female

website

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About this author

Lydia Davis,acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest. . . . Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.”

Davis’s most recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Pub...more


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Average rating: 4.04 · 9,991 ratings · 1,287 reviews · 51 distinct works
Varieties of Disturbance
3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 avg rating — 669 ratings — published 2007 — 2 editions
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Samuel Johnson is Indignant
3.97 of 5 stars 3.97 avg rating — 642 ratings — published 2001 — 4 editions
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The Collected Stories of Lydia...
4.29 of 5 stars 4.29 avg rating — 587 ratings — published 2009 — 7 editions
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Break it Down
4.12 of 5 stars 4.12 avg rating — 461 ratings — published 1986 — 5 editions
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The End of the Story
3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 avg rating — 423 ratings — published 1996 — 5 editions
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Almost No Memory
4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 avg rating — 384 ratings4 editions
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The Cows
4.3 of 5 stars 4.30 avg rating — 44 ratings — published 2011
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Story and Other Stories
4.65 of 5 stars 4.65 avg rating — 17 ratings — published 1983
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Sketches For A Life Of Wassill...
4.43 of 5 stars 4.43 avg rating — 7 ratings
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The Thirteenth Woman and Other...
4.8 of 5 stars 4.80 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 1976
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“Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.”
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

“There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.”
Lydia Davis

“We know we are very special,” Davis writes in “Special”: “Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?” (from James Wood's review of the FSG "Collected Stories of Lydia Davis")”
Lydia Davis

Topics Mentioning This Author

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The Seasonal Read...: 25.10 - Belinda's Task - Let's Play The Name Game 51 149 May 31, 2010 10:18am  
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Ambiclassics: But I LOVE that Book! 82 75 Jun 05, 2011 10:06am  
Bookish: * The Possibilities 3 50 Nov 10, 2011 01:20am  
The Balcony of Eu...: Future Group Reads Suggestions 105 17 Feb 06, 2012 03:59pm  
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