Lydia Davis is regarded as a prose stylist of distinction, originality, and enormous promise. For example, in Break It Down (1986) she writes with a restraint and irony comparable to that of the so-called minimalist writers of her generation. Davis often designates the time and place of her narratives obliquely or not at all, while limiting the psychological dimension of her characters in a way that recalls the works of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka rather than those of Donald Barthelme or Raymond Carver. This approach has doubtless been fostered by the other literary activity for which Davis is well known -- her extensive translations of such twentieth-century French authors as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Michel Butor.

The daughter of writers, both of whom have published stories in the New Yorker, Davis was born in 1947 in Northampton, Massachusetts, where her father, Robert Gorham Davis, was then...