...despite the quality of remoteness that permeates all of Davis’s work, in Our Strangers, our present anxieties creep in ... Rather than overt argument, what mainly preoccupies Davis is meticulous, almost obsessive observation of other people: passengers on trains, diners at Salzburg restaurants, a woman at a Watertown Price Chopper attempting to recycle shampoo bottles. The book feels, at times, like a compendium of off-kilter folk tales. But as the collection builds, a quiet statement begins to form: Davis seems to be providing a vision of how we might relate to the people who exist around us, of what an actual community might look like ... As fun as these neighborly fables are, the stories that linger draw their emotional heft from, or capture wry truths about, our closest attachments ... A few stories lose their tautness, particularly the ones that mention the process of their own composition...But even these reveal Davis’s ethic, which is as alert to grammatical constructions as to reality’s specifics.

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 humor or heartbreak ... However strange the process, there’s plainly pleasure in it for her, and that feeling is infectious across Our Strangers ... Davis is keying in on something more specific: the disconnect between how a speaker and receiver grasp the world, how we strive to keep others’ attention to our silly little anecdotes. If the mom wants a deeper connection with her children, why isn’t she getting it? Why does she feel a tale of applesauce will close the gap? Davis takes story seriously because she’s alert to how conventional storytelling disappoints us. For her, a clear arc always has to confront the world’s absurdity ... Davis’ fussiness evokes watchmakers or jewelers, but those analogies miss her humor. Indeed, her MO is a little closer to Buster Keaton’s. His cinematic gags were often built on the careful assemblage of a host of pieces that sometimes resolved in catastrophe, sometimes meshed delightfully. Either way, they’re beautifully choreographed, braiding attentiveness with a sense of the surreal. It’s the same for Davis: For all her concern with specificity and exactitude, her stories are usually set in moments where imprecision and confusion rule.

Lydia Davis is a sly miniaturist whose distinct blend of personal reflection, flash fiction, and poetic concision serve up little epiphanies in shot glass-sized portions ... Fortunately, Our Strangers, which is Bookshop.org's first publication, is notable for more than its author's stand against online behemoths ... I've enjoyed Davis's koan-like stories for years but never reviewed them, in part because I found them more appealing when ingested in micro-doses, like homeopathic remedies, rather than glugged down from start to finish on deadline. Although I still prefer to savor her work in dainty sips, I'm happy to report that, even read straight through, the more than 150 short-shorts in Our Strangers again feature her wry response to what she sees as life's essential oddness. Her focus has shifted largely from issues of parenting and domestic relationships to aspects of aging, but the results are as penetrating as anything she's written.

Davis’s work captivates because she chooses to notice what most of us will not ... Her latest book offers lists, reflections, fragmented portraits of middle age and family life: always sidelong, always mysteriously engrossing ... 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.

Reflects [a] new consciousness ... Her increasing ambivalence about writing is detectable in Our Strangers—not because her prose is any less good, but because its fastidiousness now seems to culminate in ordinary everyday language. In her latest stories, she has made herself smaller, shifting her focus to networks, communities, and systems, the units which we will need to think in to change course collectively ... Davis puts her arch eye for humor on full display ... It is tempting to see the stories in Our Strangers as pieces written primarily to poke fun and entertain ... Davis writes that a person’s ultimate aim should be to 'feel small and still feel strong, and good' ... By giving meticulous form to her singular sensibility, Our Strangers suggests that this fact does not have to annihilate meaning. Rather, it can be a wellspring for the wonderful and absurd.

Such is her gift for voice, and so intimate does much of her writing feel, that the temptation is to think of her work as barely clothed memoir ... Davis’s stories often sit on the page like poems, or lists, or as single stray sentences. They are, to use her word, intergeneric, and are defined at least as much by formal choices as thematic concerns. But anyone who has followed her work for some or all of the last five decades will know that it has by now settled into a series of grooves, comfortably familiar where it once felt experimental ... There are exquisite observations...wry humour...and overheard conversations that position themselves somewhere on the spectrum between whimsy and the profound ... It’s easy to have a pleasant time with Our Strangers, but there is a creeping sense of returning to a favourite resort to find its attractions have faded ... Trained by her previous work, we vainly wait for the language to get carried away, and carry us away in turn. Yet there are stories here that I think join Davis’s top rank.

Impressionistic ... To find life’s vivid detail among its minutiae is more difficult than it looks. What Davis often achieves – like Hamaguchi Ryusuke – is a rarer feat still: making it look easy.

Our Strangers’s quirky presentation sometimes hides the fact that the stories themselves are fairly uneven (there are over 150 in the book). Some of them read too much like jokes that aren’t meant to be funny ... The overall effect can become a kind of cumulative slightness. Yet that slightness does allow Davis to record details and emotions without any of the falsification that can be forced on you by the traditional narrative devices of context and plot. Part of her point is to show what ordinary life is actually like without the big claims that literature wants to make for it.

Davis is a maestro of concision, yet her very short stories are alive with extraordinary nuances of feelings and thoughts. Some are very funny; others are provocative or deeply moving ... Some stories are poems. Davis’ tales are concentrated, insightful, intriguing, and resonant.

...an overflowing treasure chest of jewel-like stories ... A collection that you'll want to keep on your bedside table by one of America’s most original short story writers.

[A] lovely collection ... Throughout, Davis revels in the glory of well-wrought details. These spot-on depictions of life’s low-key moments are best savored in small bursts.