The Friends and Foundation of APL announce our 2021 Literary Legends: Lydia Davis and Eugene Mirabelli. Our Literary Legends will be honored at the Literary Legends gala in October 2021. Stay tuned for more details about our gala in the coming weeks.
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is an internationally acclaimed fiction author and translator who is recognized as one of the most prominent contributors to flash fiction, a writing style that she has defined in her six published collections of fiction. She is a Fellow Emeritus at the New York State Writers Institute. Lydia Davis received the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. Her English versions of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary helped earn her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.
Davis has published six collections of fiction, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her most recent collections were Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, and Can’t and Won’t (2013). The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009) contains all her fiction up to 2008. Davis has also translated Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Leiris, Pierre Jean Jouve and other French writers, as well as Belgian novelist Conrad Detrez and the Dutch writer A.L. Snijders. Her most recent publication is Essays One, her first collection of non-fiction, published in 2019. A second volume, Essays Two, will be published this November and collects her essays and talks on the art of translation.
Eugene Mirabelli
Eugene (Gene) Mirabelli was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1931, began writing while in college, and published his first novel at 27. A long-time resident of Albany County, and professor emeritus of English at SUNY-Albany, he is the author of ten novels, six of which create a mosaic about an Italian American family that stretches from nineteenth-century Sicily to modern day Boston. Among these inter-related works are three which he has revised and assembled into a new, multi-faceted novel, Renato!, published just last winter. Mirabelli’s work cuts across conventional genres and disrupts everyday realism with the fantastical – the opening episodes of Renato! introduce us to a centaur, a man born with the hindquarters of a stallion; and in the middle of the novel we discover an angel, a real one with a wingspan of twelve feet! With this work, as Publishers Weekly has declared, the life and times of Renato Stillamare have at last become “a blazing magnum opus.”
Eugene Mirabelli has received numerous awards, including a Rockefeller grant. His novels include The World at Noon, The Passion of Terri Heart, and The Language Nobody Speaks. His many short stories, journalistic pieces, reviews and essays appear widely in magazines and anthologies, and are translated into Czech, French, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Sicilian. Occasionally he writes brief pieces on the arts, sciences, politics, and economics at criticalpages.com, and his website is genemirabelli.com.
