Our Strangers

(Paperback, Main)

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A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR: FICTION'A trailblazer in the world of short-form prose' New YorkerLydia 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.

Reviews

'Sharp, deft, ironic, understated and consistently surprising' - JOYCE CAROL OATES

'Our Strangers shows Lydia Davis's 'gift for voice' and 'intimate . . . writing'' - CHRIS POWER

'Davis's ability to observe and celebrate minutiae is as wise and miraculous as ever' - Financial Times

'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

'Graceful, funny, awkward, surprising, unlikely, persuasive and moving' - HEATHER CASS WHITE

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Author Bio

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.