Why publish a paperback original? Some of my favorite titles in recent years, all from big houses, have been denied the honor of hard covers. Sam Lipsyte’s misanthropic “Homeland” (Picador), Dorota Maslowska’s ultracontemporary “Snow White and Russian Red” (Grove), and now Lydia Davis’ “Varieties of Disturbance” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 219 pages, $13) have gone straight to video, while other fictions of indistinct merits appear in hardcover.

There would be no use getting angry if this were simply a matter of counter-cultural have-nots. But Mr. Lipsyte, Ms. Maslowska, and Ms. Davis are authors with established audiences — cult followings, even — and that seems to be why they get the paperback treatment.

The notion must be that a somewhat experimental writer with a youthful fan base cannot expect to grow that base. Perhaps this is a commercial reality, but it is also a cultural mistake. Ms. Davis and Mr. Lipsyte have been championed by little magazines like McSweeney’s, Open City, and n + 1 that, especially in the first case, make a point of their own youthful energy. McSweeney’s brought out Ms. Davis’s story collection “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” in a handsome hardcover edition in 2001. This greatly increased her popularity with readers under 30, apparently reducing her to paperback original status, now that she is back with a major publisher. Hardcovers are for grown-ups, paperbacks are for kids.

And yet Ms. Davis is one of the most elegant and entertaining formalists in American fiction. She has mastered a brand of short prose that balances sense against sound. She claims Samuel Beckett as a chief influence, explaining that the rhythm of Beckett’s sentences sometimes matters as much or more than their meaning. But unlike Beckett, Ms. Davis is a clear, easy read. She prefers a cogent, unified speaker to a wild, disintegrating one. Like Beckett’s Malloy, many of her speakers are obsessives, but they keep to a regular, almost conversational tone.

The poet Michael Hoffman has called this characteristic voice a “fussy drone.” Here is an excerpt representing about half of the story “Enlightened”:

I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it’s not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend.

This paragraph works like a joke. It ends with a surprising insight that instantly shades everything that preceded it. But the obsessive frame of mind that would produce such a string of sentences must be the fictional point. As in much of her work, Ms. Davis puts a tremendous amount of pressure on a question of linguistics or logic that will fleetingly imply something larger and more dramatic.

My favorite Davis stories are those that live a little in their dramatic frame before ending. These are often her longer stories. “Mrs. D and Her Maids,” in about 25 pages, tells the implicit story of Mrs. D’s marriage through the record of her hiring practices. The truly unmissable “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders” does what it says, and the question of who would conduct such an overserious survey is obviated by the simmering, hilarious inappropriateness of it.

Miranda July is a movie star, the director of “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” and her debut story collection, “No One Belongs Here More Than You” (Scribner, 205 pages, $23), gets hard covers. But her stories earn their keep, and there is no reason to call Ms. July a privileged dilettante.

The stories toward the beginning of this collection, which may also be the earliest written, fare worst. Like the recent work of George Saunders, they prize pitiful narrators overwhelmed by postmodern life, though they lack Mr. Saunders’s satirical punch. Instead, they drift into moments of stylish wonder, as in this image from the end of “The Shared Patio”: “When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day.” The grandiose innocence and clumsiness of the whale mask the narrator’s willfully stupid behavior (she takes a quirky nap while her friend has a seizure).

Ms. July’s later stories, though still kiddish, speak from a more mature standpoint. Her rapidly escalating metaphors, wet with exaggerative sarcasm, still address adult realities. Speaking about two married friends who are fighting, she writes:

They were in a wilderness that was too wild for me, they were living with bears, they were bears, their words flew past deadly animal teeth.

The narrator clearly doesn’t want to grow up. The problem with Ms. July’s writing, of course, is that even her metaphors seem to indicate something about youth culture. Why so many animals? Her voice is positioned as generational, and in fiction that can be distracting.

blytal@nysun.com