LECTURES

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which, Varieties of Disturbance, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. In 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, nearly 200 stories in a volume of over 700 pages.

Ms. Davis is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. She is at work on a translation of Madame Bovary.

The series reminds the world that reading, writing, conversation and laughter are related arts. The format is simple, the emotional reward complex. The writers read, have a conversation with the series curator, then engage in an open dialogue with the audience.

“The rigors of creativity are best appreciated at close range in small rooms where ideas swerve and loop and float with the kind of inventiveness and assurance that makes the mind swirl …” -Colin Channer, Series Curator