A brand new collection of short fiction from Lydia Davis, 'a trailblazer in the world of short-form prose' New Yorker
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR: FICTION
'A trailblazer in the world of short-form prose' New Yorker
Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers.
Our Strangers is a fascinating collection that confirms the genius of a writer whose every attention is transformative.
"Such is her gift for voice, and so intimate does much of her writing feel, that the temptation is to think of her work as barely clothed memoir ... Davis’s stories often sit on the page like poems, or lists, or as single stray sentences." - The Guardian
"Impressionistic ... To find life’s vivid detail among its minutiae is more difficult than it looks. What Davis often achieves – like Hamaguchi Ryusuke – is a rarer feat still: making it look easy." - AUS
"Davis is a maestro of concision, yet her very short stories are alive with extraordinary nuances of feelings and thoughts. Some are very funny; others are provocative or deeply moving ... Some stories are poems. Davis’ tales are concentrated, insightful, intriguing, and resonant." - Booklist
"Rather than overt argument, what mainly preoccupies Davis is meticulous, almost obsessive observation of other people: passengers on trains, diners at Salzburg restaurants, a woman at a Watertown Price Chopper attempting to recycle shampoo bottles. The book feels, at times, like a compendium of off-kilter folk tales. But as the collection builds, a quiet statement begins to form: Davis seems to be providing a vision of how we might relate to the people who exist around us, of what an actual community might look like ... As fun as these neighborly fables are, the stories that linger draw their emotional heft from, or capture wry truths about, our closest attachments ..." - The New York Times
"... beautifully choreographed, braiding attentiveness with a sense of the surreal.... For all her concern with specificity and exactitude, her stories are usually set in moments where imprecision and confusion rule." - The Los Angeles Times
"Davis’s work captivates because she chooses to notice what most of us will not ... Her latest book offers lists, reflections, fragmented portraits of middle age and family life: always sidelong, always mysteriously engrossing ... The wonder of Davis’s work is her ability to reveal how close attention—that rarest of commodities in an attention-starved world—reveals the beauty, sorrow and strangeness of all our seemingly quotidian lives." - The Times
