Night Train

Brevity is the soul of beauty in these tiny masterworks of short short fiction

Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders's "straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness." Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered herehumorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homelyare something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, butinhabiting the borderland between fiction and realitymight best be described as autobiographical mini-fables.This morning at...