360 Staff Pick: Short Stories that Pack a Punch

A volume of collected stories by any writer can be daunting, but Lydia Davis’s are all so small and seemingly light that dipping in and out feels easy. Her tone often seems dry or ironic (as with the wonderfully titled ‘Samuel Johnson Is Indignant’). But beware: Davis packs a punch. She is considered experimental, but she traffics in raw human nature, and sometimes you look up unnerved and shaken at the end of one of these modest little stories, disoriented by how it got so deep so fast.