Horse Sense & Heartache

Dan Chiasson

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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
by Lydia Davis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 733 pp., $30.00

Lydia Davis’s shortest stories, only a sentence or two long, float like little dinghies on the white of the page. They can’t be followed the way stories ordinarily are followed, nor are they “told” in the usual sense of that word. They belong to the class “fiction” but also to the larger class made up of all things isolated in time or space: specimen creatures in jars, radar blips that promise interstellar life, Beckett’s characters on a desolated stage, or John Cage’s notes dispersed across silence.

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