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 “Publishers Wee...more


Average rating: 4.08 · 17,755 ratings · 1,811 reviews · 55 distinct works · Similar authors
The Collected Stories of Ly...
4.29 of 5 stars 4.29 avg rating — 1,214 ratings — published 2009 — 14 editions
Varieties of Disturbance
3.8 of 5 stars 3.80 avg rating — 876 ratings — published 2007 — 7 editions
Samuel Johnson is Indignant
4.01 of 5 stars 4.01 avg rating — 814 ratings — published 2001 — 5 editions
Break it Down
4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 avg rating — 618 ratings — published 1986 — 7 editions
The End of the Story
3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 avg rating — 580 ratings — published 1995 — 6 editions
Almost No Memory
4.13 of 5 stars 4.13 avg rating — 478 ratings — published 1997 — 6 editions
The Cows
4.06 of 5 stars 4.06 avg rating — 90 ratings — published 2011 — 2 editions
Story, and Other Stories
4.62 of 5 stars 4.62 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 1983
Proust, Blanchot and a Woma...
4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 avg rating — 18 ratings — published 2012
Sketches For A Life Of Wass...
4.36 of 5 stars 4.36 avg rating — 11 ratings2 editions
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“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

“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

“If you think of something, do it.

Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.”
Lydia Davis



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