Our Strangers

Praise for Lydia Davis:
“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. But as it does so it leaves enough of a trace that when you read her you do it with a sense of recognition.” - Jonathan Franzen
"one of the most original minds in American fiction today.”―Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker
“Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“One of the best writers in America” - O, The Oprah Magazine
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. She lives in upstate New York.