'Collected Stories' by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis has just won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize (and I would have won the staff sweepstake if I had got around to organising one). There are 133 stories in her Collected Stories, ranging in length from a single sentence or paragraph to a few pages. You will find yourself reading them one after another until you have read them all. Davis is a master of the concise, the precise and the incisive: each sentence she writes is a scalpel wielded at the life of the emotions, removing scar tissue and all the while exposing the operations of minds under pressure and the inner gravel of ordinary life. Oh, and she’s funny, too. Most other writers seem clumsy by comparison.

(June 2013)