Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories

From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves.

A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she’s set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors.

Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times “one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction.”

The 56 stories showcase the wordplay and distillation of meaning that have become her stylistic hallmarks, offering up crisp twists on familiar themes.

Eclectic and astute, Davis continues to find new ways to tell us the things we need to know.

Outsiders, self-doubt, and alienation: all form the bedrock upon which Davis sets up an off-kilter, edgy universe distinctly her own.

Davis should be counted among the true originals of contemporary American short fiction.

Davis deploys her gift for verbal bemusement, annoyance, and high anxiety and converts her characters’ complex ruminations into narratives full of insight and pleasure.

If you’re smart, chances are good you’ll read the stories in Lydia Davis’s Samuel Johnson is Indignant. Precise and quietly unsettling. Introspective and subversive, ironic and playful, obsessive and funny.