Lydia Davis is the author of a novel, an essay collection, and seven story collections. She is a National Book award finalist and the recipient of a Man Booker International Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her second collection of nonfiction, Essays Two (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—on the experience of translating Proust, Flaubert, and Michel Leiris, learning a foreign language through reading, and an extended immersion in the city of Arles—was published in November 2021.