Center for the literary arts in New York State
ONE OF THE MOST ORIGINAL MINDS IN FICTION
Lydia Davis
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
4:30 p.m. Craft Talk / Q&A, Multipurpose Room, Campus Center West
7:30 p.m. Reading / Conversation, Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center
University at Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12222
Free and open to the public. No registration required.
Books will be for sale and a signing will follow the conversation.
Lydia Davis, one of the most accomplished writers of our time, presents Our Strangers: Stories (2023), her new collection addressing topics ranging from marriage to tiny insects. The New Yorker called her "one of the most original minds in American fiction today,” and Jonathan Franzen said, “She is the shorter Proust among us. She has the sensitivity to track the stuff that is so evanescent it flies right by the rest of us."
By request of the author, Our Strangers: Stories is available only at independent booksellers and libraries.
A former faculty member in the UAlbany English Department, Lydia Davis received the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage."
Read a review of Our Strangers published on NPR
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven collections of stories, including most recently Can't and Won't (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), as well as two collections of non-fiction, Essays One (FSG, 2019) and Essays Two (FSG, 2021).
She has won awards for her translations of works from the French which include Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Viking Penguin, 2010) and Proust's Swann's Way (Viking Penguin, 2002), and has also translated from other languages, most notably the very short stories of the Dutch writer A.L. Snijders (Night Train, New Directions, 2021).
Among other honors, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, both the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 for her fiction and, in 2020, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
She has been decorated as both Chevalier and Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translation.
Cosponsored by the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, and the Writing & Critical Inquiry (WCI) Program.
(Photo credit: Theo Cote)