Reading: the new story collection by Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance. Here’s a Salon interview conducted by Kate Moses a while back.

What I like: the brevity of the stories, the way Davis throws an idea onto the page in the first sentence and illuminates it by the end of the page. Many of these stories are indeed one-to-two-pagers, stylistically taut mini-narratives that are both intellectually and emotionally charged. The book contains three longer stories, the charming “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth Graders,” “Mrs. D. and Her Maids,” and “Helen & V: A Study in Health and Vitality.” Some of the stories are thought-provoking forays into relationships, such as “Good Times” and “Forbidden Subjects,” which when paired up delve into the way relationships go bad, one bad feeling at a time, and the way they are sometimes repaired, by slowly and carefully digging oneself out of a self-perpetuated malaise. Best of all is the way the stories, though certainly not linked in the traditional sense, nonetheless comment on each other as the collection progresses. So that “The Caterpillar,” about a bug the narrator leaves to die on a dark stairwell in her house, cannot help but bring up echoes of “Grammar Questions,” a moving story about the impending death of the narrator’s father. Highly recommended. See more of Davis’s work here.