莉迪亚·戴维斯

莉迪亚·戴维斯（英语：Lydia Davis，1947年7月15日—）是一位以短篇小说为主的美国作家，同时也是一名长篇小说作家、散文家。

她出生于马萨诸塞州，平时也从事将法语翻译成英语的工作，并且翻译了如马塞尔·普鲁斯特的《追忆逝水年华》与古斯塔夫·福楼拜的《包法利夫人》等法语小说新译本。此外除了作家以及翻译工作人员外，她也在纽约州奥巴尼的纽约州立大学奥巴尼分校担任创意写作的教授。

在作品风格上莉迪亚·戴维斯主要受到米歇尔·傅柯等法国哲学家与作家的影响，这使得她曾经发表数篇具有实验性质的中篇小说，另外也曾经尝试以日记或者书信的格式进行创作。其最为著名的小说为1976年出版的《第十三个女人和其他故事》（The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories）。而近年来戴维斯的作品则偏向仅有3页至4页的短篇小说形式，而典型的故事内容往往是以女性第一人称的角度进行叙述，并且又著简洁但幽默的故事风格。2003年10月时她获得在她麦克阿瑟奖的捐款基金，2007年时则获得美国国家图书奖短篇小说组。而在2010年时其所翻译的《包法利夫人》刊登在《花花公子》，并且因而得到广泛正面的回响。到了2013年时，她进一步荣获了布克国际奖。

1974年时她与同样为作家的保罗·奥斯特结婚并生下一子丹尼尔·奥斯特（Daniel Auster），但是之后两人则离婚收场；后来她则再度与艺术家艾伦·柯特（Alan Cote）结婚，并且生下儿子西奥·柯特（Theo Cote）。

Lydia Davis (born July 15, 1947) is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, poet, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes very short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Early life and education

Davis was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1947. She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis, a critic and professor of English,

and Hope Hale Davis, a short-story writer, teacher, and memoirist. Davis initially studied music, first piano, then violin, which was her first love. On becoming a writer, Davis has said, "I was probably always headed to being a writer, even though that wasn't my first love. I guess I must have always wanted to write in some part of me or I wouldn't have done it." From fifth to eighth grade, she attended The Brearley School in New York City. She attended high school at The Putney School, graduating in 1965. She studied at Barnard College, and at that time she mostly wrote poetry.

In 1974, Davis married Paul Auster, with whom she had a son named Daniel (1977–2022). Auster and Davis later divorced; Davis is now married to the artist Alan Cote, with whom she has another son, Theo Cote.

She is a professor emerita at the University at Albany, SUNY, and was a Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University in 2012.

Career

Davis has published six collections of fiction, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her most recent collections were Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, and Can't and Won't (2013). The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009) contains all her short fiction up to 2008.

Davis has also translated Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Butor, Michel Leiris, Pierre Jean Jouve and other French writers, as well as Belgian novelist Conrad Detrez and the Dutch writer A. L. Snijders.

She has written one novel, The End of the Story, which was published in 1995 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Reception and influence

Davis has been described as "the master of a literary form largely of her own invention." Some of her "stories" are only one or two sentences. Davis has compared these works to skyscrapers in the sense that they are surrounded by an imposing blank expanse. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael LaPointe goes so far as to say while "Lydia Davis did not invent flash fiction, ... she is so far and away its most eminent contemporary practitioner". Her "distinctive voice has never been easy to fit into conventional categories," writes Kasia Boddy in the Columbia Companion to the 21st Century Short Story. Boddy writes: "Davis's parables are most successful when they examine the problems of communication between men and women, and the strategies each uses to interpret the other's words and actions." Of contemporary authors, only Davis, Stuart Dybek, and Alice Fulton share the distinction of appearing in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry series.