Lydia Davis

"Essays One" by Lydia Davis. 

Lydia Davis writes ultra-short short stories that straddle the line between prose poem and absurd joke. A child of two writers, she accepted fiction as her work without enjoying it ve...

Lydia Davis talks about her new collection of short stories, Can’t and Won’t. Her stories may be one-liners or they may be lengthier investigations, stories in the form of letters of complaint, stories extracted from Flaubert’s correspondence, or they may be inspired by the author’s own dreams or the dreams of friends. Davis is a MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient and in 2013 she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize.

Madame Bovary, one of the most celebrated novels ever written, defined the novel as an art form when it was published in 1875. Lydia Davis’s landmark translation of Flaubert’s work breathes new life into it. When it was first published, Madame Bovary was embraced by bourgeois women who felt it illuminated the frustrations of their lives. It tells the story of Emma Rouault, whose dreams of a passionate life crumble when she marries a dull, provincial doctor Charles Bovary. She struggles to escape the tedium of her days as a wife and mother. She has a series of disappointing affairs and spends money getting into debt, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.

Lydia Davis discusses her English translation of Gustave Flaubert’s acclaimed classic novel Madame Bovary, considered the first masterpiece of realist fiction. In this landmark translation, Davis honors the nuances and particulars of a style that has long beguiled readers of French, giving the novel a new life in English.

Lydia Davis discusses her latest collection, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.