Lydia Davis

Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1947, Lydia Davis published her first book, The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, in 1976. She won acclaim for Break It Down in 1986, a collection of stories, some of which are no longer than a paragraph. She has translated from the French Maurice Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, among other works.