Essays by Lydia Davis review – a woman of few words well chosen

Lydia Davis’s essays about writing and meaning are like her micro-stories: witty, playful and pared to the bare essentials

This is quite a long book in praise of brevity. Lydia Davis, who has emerged relatively late in life to take a seat at the top table of American letters, is the peerless exponent of what has come to be known as “flash fiction”. She writes short stories or texts of unsettling wit and invention – or sudden piercing melancholy – that rarely last more than a page or three and often consist of only a few sentences adrift in white space.

For many years, because of her experiments with form, Davis was considered a literary anomaly – the micro-story writer who also translated Proust – but that changed when a fat volume of her collected stories was published in 2009 and her serial instances of brilliant minimalism could be viewed as the stem cells of a larger body of work. Since then she has enjoyed a wide readership and acclaim, including winning the international Man Booker prize in 2013, when, happily, the chair of the judges was Christopher Ricks, a critic excitedly alive to writing at the scale of syllable and caesura.

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