Lydia Davis works literary magic in miniature
A review by Erika Recordon
To savor or to gorge? It's a question that's been weighing heavy on Lydia Davis fans all month. Spanning 20 years and four volumes of short fiction, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is here. There are 198 stories, an overwhelming number for any writer. But Davis is a woman of economy, and many of her pieces run only a page or two in length (some stop at a single sentence). So it's tempting to carry this book with its punchy orange cover everywhere you go. You can read one boiled-down narrative at a time all over town -- in the waiting room at a doctor's office, on the bus to work, in line at the supermarket. Or you can do as I did, and binge. That is, you can take this book in all at once in its full, demented glory, and read and read and read until you feel dizzy with Davis' strange and wonderful worldview. Davis, whose work has been called everything from microfiction to prose poetry, is not much for labels. "I prefer 'adventurous,'" she told the Boston Globe in 2007. And...
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Previously Reviewed by The Oregonian
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