Why You Can’t Buy Lydia Davis’s New Book on Amazon

Lydia Davis’s stories are like Fabergé eggs: miniature and intricate and, more often than not, flawless. She’s an essayist, infrequent novelist, translator of writers including Proust and Flaubert, and, most of all, the reigning English-language master of the very short story. Her collections are both wry and bighearted, abstract and autobiographical. They are consistently fascinated with the mundane: She might write about a shopping list, a train ride, a bad but uneventful meal. Reading them means standing at the boundaries of story and essay, story and poem, story and scribbled note. What makes these short stories? you may ask yourself on leafing through one of her books. Keep reading, though, and before long, the question will become: Why didn’t I know this was how stories could be?