Review: Lydia Davis. 2019. Essays One. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lydia Davis. 2021. Essays Two. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lydia Davis. 2009. The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In a short conversation with Piotr Florczyk, published in this issue of Explorations, Lydia Davis remarks: "Reading, in a way, is more active than watching an episode or a movie on television or on a device.The writer is the one supplying the words on the page, but the reader is the one forming the images in his or her mind."Such a readerlyand of course writerlyalertness informs much of what we can find in Davis's three books that have been recently published by the New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (the Collected Stories volume, originally published in 2009, has been re-issued in a new format).It can be easily noticed that the storieswitty, minimalist, elaborately constructedas well as the critical essays, with their subjects ranging from the mechanics of sentence revision to the interpretation of the Bible, call for active involvement.The reader often feels invited to co-write and even countersign texts.And there are many surprises on the way.Very often we follow Davis not knowing what may come next (this is particularly true of her short stories) and one must admit such a postponement of the reader's knowledge is a highly rewarding experience.As far as narrative fiction is concerned, we come across plain realistic tales but we are also led into surrealistic, almost Kafkaesque hallucinations.In the critical volumes, standard essays are followed by impressionistic observations and meticulous analyses in the best tradition of close reading, and these are interspersed with reviews, commentaries, personal notes and interviewsa real cornucopia of styles and forms.Importantly, though, there is a sense of unaffectedness and ease permeating Davis's texts.When at one moment she notices: "The book came about quite naturally" (Essays One ix), we feel that this statement stands true with almost all of her writings.Davis's narrative works are sometimes classified as flash fiction, a vague and not very helpful term which refers to minimalist prose units.Her stories are often one-paragraph long, some of them not going beyond one or two sentences.Davis has an absolute control over the formin The Collected Stories (over 700 pages) there are no unnecessary phrases and words, let alone motifs or incidents, and the texts are precise up to the point of vertigo.The exactness has an ironic edge to it, of course.Davis constantly highlights the absurdity of logic and its claims to human life.Reviewers have noticed that one of her main themes is failed communication, and that is certainly true of most of her stories.