A 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.
"Our Strangers shows Lydia Davis's 'gift for voice' and 'intimate . . . writing'" - * 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
"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" - * 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 *