The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Davis, Lydia. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Picador, 2010.

Break It Down (1986), Davis’s debut collection, establishes her minimalist, fragmentary style. Many of the stories capture small domestic moments—meals, marriages, housework—that are unsettled by estrangement or irony. Some pieces are no more than a paragraph, while others unfold more traditionally. Themes of intimacy, discontent, and the oddities of language pervade. In the title story, “Break It Down,” a man tries to calculate the cost—financial and emotional—of a love affair, showing Davis’s signature interest in the intersections of logic, emotion, and language.

Almost No Memory (1997) expands Davis’s range while retaining brevity. Here, memory and its distortions are central, whether in personal anecdotes, pseudo-historical accounts, or metafictional fragments. Many stories feature narrators reflecting on failed communication, failed love, or small dislocations of daily life. The mix includes sketches of odd academic figures, comic thought experiments, and more realist vignettes. Stories like “Lord Royston’s Tour” and “The Center of the Story” demonstrate Davis’s tendency to digress, layering anecdotes within anecdotes while still circling around absence, uncertainty, and incompleteness.

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001) tilts further toward brevity and absurdist humor. Some stories are a single sentence long, others spin out into academic parody, personal reflection, or dreamlike vignettes. Themes include the failures of conversation, petty quarrels, intellectual vanity, and the intrusions of illness and aging. Narratives often destabilize ordinary domestic life—funeral homes, medical diaries, and family squabbles—by highlighting the inadequacy of words themselves. The title story, “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant,” epitomizes the collection’s characteristic wit and compression.

Davis’s most formally varied collection, Varieties of Disturbance (2007) includes diary fragments, imagined letters, pseudo-scientific reports, and surreal fictions. Here, the breakdown of communication and family life is juxtaposed with meditations on writing, translation, and history. Standout pieces include “Kafka Cooks Dinner” (a fictional imagining of Franz Kafka’s anxieties) and “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders” (a pseudo-academic analysis of children’s notes)