The work of the Belgian writer Nicole Malinconi is largely in line with the tendency to fragmentarity, which in addition to hybridism and collage is one of the main trends of post-modern narratives. In her works, fragmentarity is manifested in the form of a short story, which the author herself calls the brève. The article is an analysis of the characteristics of the short form, proper for Malinconi, and especially for its socially engaged works in which it performs important functions. The short story, through its brevity and the resulting intensity, interacts more easily with the reader. It also gains considerable critical power.

Bogusław Wolniewicz’s book Things and facts, although it is essentially devoted to the interpretation of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, also has a substantive layer in which Wolniewicz raises very important problems in the fields of methodology, semiotics and metaphysics, such as: (a) the problem of clarity of philosophical texts and its relation to simplicity and brevity, as well as to thoroughness and suggestiveness; (b) the problem of semantic correlation types; (c) the problem of analysis, interpretation and definition; (d) the problems of modality, negative facts, absolute monism and coherentionism; (e) the problem of abstraction and moral-praxeological antinomy. The author of the paper reconstructs Wolniewicz’s views on these matters.