‘Our Strangers’ by Lydia Davis

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. Her decision to have her first story collection in 10 years sold exclusively through independent bookstores has made headlines and necessitated breaking with her longtime publisher.

Fortunately, Our Strangers, which is Bookshop.org’s first publication, is notable for more than its author’s stand against online behemoths.

Davis has been hailed as “our Vermeer,” “a magician,” and a “distinct and crookedly personal” writer. Her brilliance became more widely recognized after the 2009 publication of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, an anthology that encompasses all her short fiction through 2008. Two brick-like volumes of collected essays released in 2019 and 2021– on her work in fiction and translation, respectively — further showcased the substantial heft of her oeuvre.

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.

Socrates famously argued that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” No one could accuse Davis of living an unexamined life, although its value remains subject to her constant self-assessments.

“Learning to Sing” exemplifies Davis’ dogged yet humorous line of inquiry, although…