Of gherkins and potato chips

Lydia Davis the translator par excellence of Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (French to English), has published her second short story collection, Can't and Won't.

Here's what Don Chiasson has to say about the collection in The New York Review of Books:

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.

One of the shortest stories that Davis has composed thus far in her writing career is "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant." The story is a sentence-long:

That Scotland has so few trees.

Davis' collection surprises, says a reviewer; the best analogy is that of reaching inside a bag of potato chips and pulling out gherkins.