Author(s): Lydia Davis

Short Stories | USA

A new collection of short fiction from the critically acclaimed master of the form and winner of the Booker International Prize, Lydia Davis.

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.

Review: 'Praise for Lydia Davis: This is writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust . . . She's a joy' - ALI SMITH

'A writer of vast intelligence and originality' - Independent on Sunday

'Davis is brilliant . . . She captures words as a hunter might and uses punctuation like a trap Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail . . . a most original and daring mind' - Colm Toibin

'The patron saint of befuddled reality . . . Inimitable' - New York Times

'An author who takes nothing for granted . . . her stories ask existential questions, about us and the world' - Los Angeles Times

Author Biography: 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. She lives in upstate New York.