AWARD-WINNING NOVELIST, TRANSLATOR, AND SHORT STORY WRITER LYDIA DAVIS TO GIVE READING AT BARD COLLEGE NOVEMBER 13

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— Renowned writer and translator Lydia Davis will read from her work at Bard College on Monday, November 13. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Davis should be counted among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction.” She is the author of Almost No Memory, The End of the Story, Break It Down, and Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, among other works. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has won Guggenheim, Lannan Foundation, and Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest awards, among others. She will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, which is being presented as part of Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public and takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema in Bertelsmann Campus Center. Lydia Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, Break It Down, which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Praised by many critics for their formal and thematic eclecticism and compelling tightly knit narratives, the stories in Break It Down attest, as Michiko Kakutani has written in the New York Times, “to the authors’s gifts as an observer and anarchist of emotion.” The book's positive critical reception helped to win Davis a prestigious Whiting Writer's Award in 1988. Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Françoise Giroud, Michel Butor, and others. Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, Swann’s Way is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century. Davis is a graduate of Barnard College and has taught fiction workshops at Columbia University and fiction and translation workshops at the University of California at San Diego. In addition, she was also a member of the graduate faculty at Bard College. She is currently on leave from her position as professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Albany. For more information about the reading, call 845-758-1539. # # # (10.27.06)

This event was last updated on 11-16-2006

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