“The unclassifiable writer and translator’s collected nonfiction shows us a brilliant mind at work.” The New Republic

Winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, Lydia Davis’s writing is a masterclass in control: wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. She explores the limits of literature while simultaneously showing the power of a few well-chosen words. Her dazzling collection Essays is as elegant, illuminating and engaging as the micro-fiction her readers love. Written over several decades, Essays is structured into recurring categories and includes pieces on Rimbaud, Pynchon, Stendhal, Lucia Berlin, Joan Mitchell, Barthes and Flaubert.

Her work includes The End of the Story: A Novel and several story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government.

Lydia Davis will explore the vast range of her literary influences with writer and critic, Brian Dillon.

Programmed with Passa Porta, International House of Literature in Brussels in collaboration with Dr. Sofie Verraest.

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This event is part of our Forms & Influences series. 

From the holy voice of Aretha Franklin to the precision of Beckett’s prose, the influences on a writers’ vision come in many guises. Forms & Influences explores the artistic minds and motivations of Rachel Kushner, Lydia Davis, André Aciman, Hanif Abdurraqib, Vivian Gornick and Salman Rushdie, celebrates the essay and traces the arc of a writer’s life, from formative years to mature reflection, through real life and artistic epiphany.

With each book a cultural playlist between hardcovers, join us and set forth on along new pathways of discovery.

IMAGE: Theo Cote