Our Strangers

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.

About the Author

Lydia Davis is a short story writer, the author of one novel and of two volumes of non-fiction, Essays One (2019) and Essays Two (2021). She is also an award-winning translator from French and other languages. Her honours include a MacArthur Fellowship (2003), the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2013), the Man Booker International Prize (2013) for her fiction and in 2020 the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She has been decorated as both Chevalier and Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translation. In 2023, Lydia Davis won Fiction Author of the Year in Bookshop.org's Indie Champion Awards. She lives in upstate New York.

Reviews

"Graceful, funny, awkward, surprising, unlikely, persuasive and moving —Heather Cass White, Times Literary Supplement

"[A] delicious collection of off-beat, drolly observant tales. Even the slenderest (and some are a few scant lines) contain whole worlds of suggestion and feeling, displaying an absorbing inquisitiveness into the natural world and human nature that's irresistible" —Daily Mail

"Despite the quality of remoteness that permeates all of Davis's work, in Our Strangers, our present anxieties creep in" —New York Times Book Review

"Davis, a meticulous fiction writer and an acclaimed translator, observes words with care and bemusement, tuned to the way different contexts alter their sound and meaning, sparking confusion or humour or heartbreak" —Los Angeles Times

"Davis is the pre-eminent practitioner of flash fiction... Her sharp observations of even mundane human interactions are presented so vividly and economically that they feel like contemporary fables" —New Statesman

Dimensions: 13 x 2.2 x 20 cm