THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS. Lydia Davis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $30. 740 pages.

These days, when literature springs from mere experience and memoirs are justified by a change in eating habits, it seems fitting to remark on the heritage of Lydia Davis. Her father, Robert Gorham Davis, was a literary critic and author. He taught literature at Harvard (where he urged Norman Mailer to submit his first short story to Story magazine), Smith (where he taught Sylvia Plath) and Columbia. He died in 1998. Davis' mother was also a writer, an active feminist and communist. She died in 2004. Davis was married to Paul Auster.

Davis studied writing the way painters study painting: copying the old masters -- favorite sentences from her favorite authors, especially Beckett but also Kafka and Proust. She became a translator, of Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault and others. She has written seven short-story collections and one novel.

This volume contains the stories from four collections: Break It Down, Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and Varieties of Disturbance. Every story, whether one sentence or 20 pages, betrays an active mind. Sometimes too active. A reader might dig in his heels, doubt the narrator, refuse to follow her circular logic: ``If I'm confused about all this,'' the narrator in Thyroid Diary admits, ``it may be because of my underactive thyroid. Slow thinking is one symptom of an underactive thyroid, but I can't tell if I'm thinking more slowly than I used to. Since my brain is the only thing I have for observing how I am thinking, I can't be truly objective.''

Each collection has its own feel. Break It Down is full of loneliness. The narrators are on the left side of love's learning curve. From Safe Love: ``She was in love with her son's pediatrician. Alone out in the country -- could anyone blame her.''

Almost No Memory is full of the tensions involved in creating families and dissolving relationships. In Glenn Gould, the narrator, who has moved out of the city and spends her days watching her baby and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, is heartened to learn that pianist Gould also loved the show. ``The intensity is gone now,'' she thinks. ``In the late afternoon, the sun comes in the window almost horizontally across the living-room floor, there are wooden blocks everywhere on the rug, the baby is often playing beside me, I play with him to keep him busy, and I look up at the screen as often as I can.'' Later in the story, the narrator takes walks and looks hard for things to think about. The reader is free to create her own picture.

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant is enigmatic, buoyant, rebellious, containing some of the shortest of Davis' flash fiction; the raw elements of story. Some, like Information From the North Concerning the Ice (``Each seal uses many blowholes and each blowhole is used by many seals'') are pure shards. These are some of Davis' most playful stories.

In Varieties of Disturbance, Davis has achieved an angelic, objective distance. In Grammar Questions, the narrator looks at her father's dying, considering the grammatical angles: ``I don't know if there is a `he,' even though people will say `He is dead.' But it does seem correct to say `he is dead.' This may be the last time he will still be `he' in the present tense. Or it will not be the last time, because I will also say, `He is lying in his coffin.' I will not say, and no one will say, `It is lying in the coffin,' or `It is lying in its coffin.'''

We are in a period in literary history when accuracy, clarity and faithfulness seem transgressive. But that -- shorter, faster, more changeable -- is only culture. Davis, with her family tree and her rich soil, answers to a higher god.

Susan Salter Reynolds reviewed this book for The Los Angeles Times.

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