Paul Grondahl writes about Lydia Davis in the Times Union, with statements from Writers Institute
director Don Faulkner, and fellow UAlbany faculty member Lynne Tillman:
"She is a unique fiction writer who writes very short stories that are highly reflective, kind of ironic and sometimes comical. They play with the very concept of what storytelling is," said Donald Faulkner, director of the New York State Writers Institute at UAlbany.
"She is an excellent editor, great teacher and sympathetic reader who has helped a lot of young writers," Faulkner said. "She's not a prima donna on any level."
Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Short-is-big-for-local-writer-4544778.php#ixzz2UDyIRcwD
Friday, May 24, 2013
Short Is Big for Local Writer
The Short, Short Stories of Lydia Davis
The New York Times blog discusses the shortness of Lydia Davis's short stories following the announcement of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize:
http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/the-short-story-of-lydia-daviss-man-booker-prize/
Lydia will teach another multiple-week Community Writers Workshop in Fall 2013 (free and open to the public on a competitive basis).
More about her here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia13.html
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Lydia Davis Will Teach Here Again in the Fall of 2013!
Lydia Davis, winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, will teach a free Community
Writers Workshop at the NYS Writers Institute in the fall of 2013! The workshop is open to the general public on a competitive basis.
Previous winners of the prize have included Philip Roth, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe and Ismail Kadare.
Here's some video of Lydia from a 2010 talk at the Institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7rPWVS8MT0
More on Lydia and her prize: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia13.html
Sweet Picture of Lydia Davis in the Los Angeles Times
The LA Times has a nice picture of the NYS Writers Institute's Lydia Davis at the moment she
learned she had won the Man Booker International Prize.
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-lydia-davis-wins-man-booker-international-prize-20130522,0,2279746.story
Read More......
President Jones Congratulates Lydia Davis on Her Booker International Prize
“Lydia Davis has repeatedly challenged our notions of storytelling,
and in doing so has influenced a generation of writers, both here in Albany and
on the international stage,” said UAlbany President Robert J. Jones. “We’re
extremely proud of her great honor and international acclaim.”
More about Lydia Davis and the 2013 Man Booker International Prize here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/davis_lydia13.html
Read More......
Our Own Lydia Davis Wins the Booker International Prize!
Lydia Davis, leading author
of short fiction, New York State Writers Institute Writing Fellow, and a University
at Albany English Department faculty member, has been awarded the 2013 Man
Booker International Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of
literature. The award is given every two years to an author of any nationality
in order to recognize an outstanding body of work in English or available in
English translation. Sir Christopher Ricks, chair of the judges’ panel, said
that Davis’s “writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just
how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be
miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or
even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations…. There is a vigilance to her
stories, and great imaginative attention.”
Writing in the Guardian (UK) in 2009, Hephzibah
Anderson declared that the Booker International Prize “is fast becoming the
more significant award, appearing an ever more competent alternative to the
Nobel.” Previous winners have included Philip Roth (2011), Alice Munro (2009),
Chinua Achebe (2007) and Ismail Kadare (2005). The prize is £60,000
(approximately $91,000).
Lydia Davis has been called
“one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), “an American virtuoso of the short
story form” (Salon), and “one of the
best writers in America” (O Magazine). She
is renowned in literary circles for perfecting the craft of the “extremely
short short story,” and has begun to enjoy a much wider readership. Novelist
Dave Eggers has said that Davis’s work, “blows the roof off of so many of our
assumptions about what constitutes short fiction.”
This coming fall semester at
UAlbany, Davis is scheduled to teach a tuition-free writing workshop over the
course of several weeks, open to the public on a competitive basis, under the
sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute. Davis has taught community
writing workshops for the Institute on five previous occasions (2005-2009). She
first visited UAlbany in 2000 as a guest of the Institute’s Visiting Writers
Series. During that visit, Institute Director Donald Faulkner, among others,
suggested she apply for a teaching position in the English Department. She joined
the faculty and became an Institute Writing Fellow in 2002. Faulkner commented,
“We are very proud to count Lydia Davis among our Fellows. She is a great
talent, an excellent teacher, and a wonderful colleague. She richly deserves
this award.”
Her newest book is The Collected Stories (2009), a
compilation of stories from four previously published volumes including Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001), Almost No Memory (1997) and Break it Down (1986). Appearing to rave
reviews in the mainstream press, the book is being described as a “surprise
bestseller” by its publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux.
In a New Yorker review, James Wood said, “Finally, one can read a large
portion of Davis’s work, spanning three decades and more than seven hundred
pages, and a grand cumulative achievement comes into view— a body of work
probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic
brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical
pressure, and human wisdom. I suspect that [the book] will in time be seen as
one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and
crookedly personal, like the work of Flannery O’Connor, or Donald Barthelme, or
J. F. Powers.”
Davis received a $500,000
MacArthur Foundation award in 2003. In granting the award the Foundation
praised Davis Davis
A Chevalier of the Order of
Arts and Letters in France, Davis is also one of the most respected translators
into English of French literary fiction by Proust, Flaubert, Foucault and
Blanchot. In 2003, Davis London Davis
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620.
Read More......
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Honoring a Member of Our Audience
one who once told us in passing that he would put up posters of some of our visitors in his garage.
From the Times Union:
Guilderland
Richard "Dick" Patrick, Albany's first city planner and an intimate of Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, who brought a quirky sense of humor and spirit of play to his wide-ranging interests, died Saturday at the Hospice Inn at St. Peter's Hospital.
He had undergone three heart bypass surgeries and had a brief battle with cancer. He was 76.
Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Albany-s-first-city-planner-dies-at-76-4481172.php#ixzz2S9o4YTw3 Read More......
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