The Bare Essentials: Lydia Davis
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One important thing: the time of the event is 18:00 Irish Time / GMT so this would be 19:00 your time...
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Over the past year, we have had to look for – and find – new ways of bringing literature to readers. During our search we discovered not only new methods but also new partners. One of these partners is the International Literature Festival Dublin, which is about to start. We are delighted to present a first joint programme: The Bare Essentials with Lydia Davis. Those who saw her at the 2013 Passa Porta Festival know that this will be a not-to-be-missed conversation with an author who rarely gives public interviews.
The work of Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize, is a masterclass in control: sharp and lucid, always le mot juste. She explores the boundaries of literature and at the same time demonstrates the power of a handful of measured words. Her essays, recently collected in Essays One, are as elegant and compelling as her acclaimed micro-fictions. In these essays, she sheds light on Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas Pynchon, Lucia Berlin, Joan Mitchell, Roland Barthes and Gustave Flaubert.
An ideal guest, therefore, for a conversation about literary and other influences. Author and essayist Brian Dillon is our host in London, while Lydia Davis joins us from her home in the US.
Lydia Davis (b. 1947) is widely known as the queen of the short story and of a form that she herself largely invented: the ultra-short story. Since the 1970s she has published several collections of short stories, which have been nominated for the National Book Award, among others. In 2009 these were gathered as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, her international breakthrough. Davis has also translated a large number of French authors, including Flaubert, Proust and Foucault. In 2013 she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize and that same year she was a guest at our Long Night of the Short Story.
Brian Dillon (b. 1969) is a writer and reviewer. He is the author of, among others, Essayism, The Great Explosion, In the Dark Room (winner of the Irish Book Award for non-fiction) and the recent essay collection Suppose a Sentence. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement.
The Bare Essentials with Lydia Davis is programmed by the Literature Festival Dublin and Passa Porta in collaboration with curator Dr. Sofie Verraest.
picture lydia davis © jeremy sutton hibbert
picture brian dillon © colin mc pherson
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