Our Strangers
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Canongate Books
Published:6th Jun '24
Should be back in stock very soon

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.
Our Strangers shows Lydia Davis's 'gift for voice' and 'intimate . . . writing' -- CHRIS POWER *  * Guardian *  *
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 *  * Sunday 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 *  *
Elegant, mundane and as genius as ever, Lydia Davis has written another timeless and totally perfect collection -- CATHERINE LACEY
ISBN: 9781805302193
Dimensions: 200mm x 130mm x 22mm
Weight: 253g
368 pages
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