Description
Book SynopsisA FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023: 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.
Trade ReviewSharp, deft, ironic, understated and consistently surprising -- JOYCE CAROL OATES
Our Strangers shows Lydia Davis's 'gift for voice' and 'intimate . . . writing' -- CHRIS POWER * * Guardian * *
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
-- ERICA WAGNER * * Sunday Times * *
Davis's ability to observe and celebrate minutiae is as wise and miraculous as ever * * Financial Times * *
Graceful, funny, awkward, surprising, unlikely, persuasive and moving -- HEATHER CASS WHITE * * Times Literary Supplement * *
Lydia Davis has, in recent years, become the most successful and prominent practitioner of flash and super-short fiction * * Daily Telegraph * *
[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 * *
