<i>Our Strangers </i>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 <i>Our Strangers</i>, 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,
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.