A Captain’s diary

Lydia Davis is a short story writer, novelist, and translator. She is the author of six collections of short stories, including Can’t and Won’t (2014) and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009); one novel, The End of the Story (1995); and two collections of nonfiction, Essays One (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (2021). Her collection Varieties of Disturbance (2007) was nominated for the National Book Award. Davis is best known for her very short, micro- or “flash” fiction; many of her stories are a single sentence or paragraph long. As a translator, she has undertaken novels and works of philosophy from French, including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2010) and, to much acclaim, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2003).

Honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Man Booker International Prize. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She is a professor emerita at SUNY Albany.