SOURCE: Davis, Lydia, with Christopher J. Knight. “An Interview with Lydia Davis.” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 4 (winter 1999): 525-51.

In the following interview, Davis discusses major influences on her work, stylistic aspects of her fiction, and the major thematic concerns of her stories and novels.

Lydia Davis was born in 1947, in Northampton, Massachusetts, where her late father, Robert Gorham Davis, was a professor of English at Smith College. Her mother, Hope Hale Davis, remains active as both a teacher and a writer. In 1957, Davis moved with her family to New York City, where her father assumed an appointment at Columbia University. Before beginning college at Barnard in 1965, Davis attended the Brearley School and, later, the Putney School in Vermont. While at Barnard, she met Paul Auster, the future novelist, whom she married in 1974. (They had a son, Daniel, born in 1977, and divorced in the early 1980s.) After college, Davis and...