American · b. 1947
Lydia Davis writes stories that other writers call stories but that resist the name. Some are a sentence long. Some are translations. Some are observations so precise they become something new. The American author won the International Booker Prize in 2013 for her collected stories. Her translations of Proust, Flaubert, and Blanchot are definitive. Davis works at the border between fiction and other things—philosophy, linguistics, the raw notation of consciousness.