5 must-read 21st century books like Our Strangers: Stories by Lydia Davis

Cover of Our Strangers: Stories by Lydia Davis

Our Strangers: Stories

By: Lydia Davis

3.92

Format: 354 pages, Hardcover

Only available at independent bookstores and libraries, by request of the author. From one of the m…

If you liked the 21st century plot in Our Strangers: Stories by Lydia Davis , here is a list of 5 books like this:

1. 300 Arguments: Essays

By: Sarah Manguso

3.62

Format: 192 pages,

A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists There will co… read more

Similar categories in Sarah Manguso's 300 Arguments: Essays book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

Cover of Splinters by Leslie Jamison

2. Splinters

By: Leslie Jamison

3.86

Format: 272 pages, Hardcover

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveti… read more

Similar categories in Leslie Jamison's Splinters book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

Cover of All Fours by Miranda July

3. All Fours

By: Miranda July

3.81

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

The New York Times–bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tende… read more

Similar categories in Miranda July's All Fours book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"Maybe we shouldn't do that," Jordi said. "Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn't have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn't we be normalizing change?"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"I guess any calling, no mater what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache," I said, giving in to knowing more than him. "It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will c…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to co…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

Cover of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

4. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

By: Lorrie Moore

3.31

Format: 193 pages, Hardcover

Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs--a daring, meditative exploration of love and… read more

Similar categories in Lorrie Moore's I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"I've become. An object of dismay. I guess."

-Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

"Do I jar you?" he asks with his sly charm. "No," I say. “I am braced at every turn for disenchantment."

-Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Cover of Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

5. Roman Stories

By: Jhumpa Lahiri

3.80

Format: 224 pages, Hardcover

Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is … read more

Similar categories in Jhumpa Lahiri's Roman Stories book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • short stories
  • fiction
  • contemporary
Cover of Blackouts by Justin Torres

6. Blackouts

By: Justin Torres

3.77

Format: 306 pages, Hardcover

From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collect… read more

Similar categories in Justin Torres's Blackouts book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
Cover of The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

7. The Vulnerables

By: Sigrid Nunez

3.61

Format: 256 pages, Hardcover

The New York Times –bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend and What Are You … read more

Similar categories in Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • 21st century
  • novels
"Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeli…"

-Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

Cover of So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan

8. So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men

By: Claire Keegan

3.99

Format: 128 pages, Hardcover

Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with th… read more

Similar categories in Claire Keegan's So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • short stories
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"You know what is at the heart of misogyny? When it comes down to it?’ ‘So I’m a misogynist now?’ ‘It’s simply about not giving,’ she said."

-Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men

Cover of The Long Form by Kate Briggs

9. The Long Form

By: Kate Briggs

4.09

Format: 480 pages, Paperback

Helen and her young baby, Rose, are awake. It is first thing on a new morning. They move, they rest… read more

Similar categories in Kate Briggs's The Long Form book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • 21st century
  • novels
"For what if it were easier to love a pattern when you were a pattern yourself? When social life required that you fall into its established patterns, starting with the basic division of day and night…"

-Kate Briggs, The Long Form

"The novel, by working with the interplay of durations, and inviting the reader to interact with them, has the capacity to pay a double, triple, multiple allegiance to the weird workings of time, to o…"

-Kate Briggs, The Long Form

"The world is surprising. It had undiscovered stores. It is not yet wholly given. There will be new gestures, new questions, new forms of life. The capacity to welcome them, to make room for them (to …"

-Kate Briggs, The Long Form

"I know time. I know time differently now. I know it because I am unlearning it. I know it because the baby is teaching me that the rhythms of the clock and the calendar, and even the most elemental d…"

-Kate Briggs, The Long Form

Cover of Parade by Rachel Cusk

10. Parade

By: Rachel Cusk

3.70

Format: 198 pages, Hardcover

From the exhilarating mind of Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, Parade disturbs and defin… read more

Similar categories in Rachel Cusk's Parade book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"He knew that [his work] embodied change, and he wasn’t interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind in its storming passage toward the future."

-Rachel Cusk, Parade

"Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence, can illuminate one’s own unknowability. Art is the pact of individuals denying socie…"

-Rachel Cusk, Parade

"Sanity and insanity were not opposites but rather were the two faces of inanimate matter, the point at which the existence of consciousness can get no further in breaking down the existence of substa…"

-Rachel Cusk, Parade

"The impulse to have a child is very often a response to the woman’s own childhood, as though her childhood has left her incomplete, or has taken a part of her that she is driven to find again. The st…"

-Rachel Cusk, Parade

Cover of Our Strangers: Stories by Lydia Davis

11. Our Strangers: Stories

By: Lydia Davis

3.92

Format: 354 pages, Hardcover

Only available at independent bookstores and libraries, by request of the author. From one of the m… read more

Similar categories in Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • poetry
  • literary fiction
  • american
  • flash fiction
  • anthologies
  • short stories
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • 21st century
  • novels
Cover of Orbital by Samantha Harvey

12. Orbital

By: Samantha Harvey

3.73

Format: 207 pages, Hardcover

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital  deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men … read more

Similar categories in Samantha Harvey's Orbital book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"Maybe we're the new dinosaurs and need to watch out."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It's always now, it's never now."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"That's all this great human endeavor of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration, a bid for survival. A looping song sent into the open, a territorial animal song."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Cover of Tremor by Teju Cole

13. Tremor

By: Teju Cole

3.69

Format: 229 pages, Hardcover

A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violen… read more

Similar categories in Teju Cole's Tremor book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"I had not noticed before how every stretch of this route contains personal memories, how the city is like one of those movies shot in a single take from the window of a moving car."

-Teju Cole, Tremor

Cover of Modern Poetry: Poems by Diane Seuss

14. Modern Poetry: Poems

By: Diane Seuss

4.53

Format: 112 pages, Hardcover

Diane Seuss’s signature voice―audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its … read more

Similar categories in Diane Seuss's Modern Poetry: Poems book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • poetry
  • contemporary
Cover of Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

15. Alphabetical Diaries

By: Sheila Heti

4.02

Format: 224 pages, Hardcover

A thrilling confessional from the award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour. Sheila Heti kept a… read more

Similar categories in Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • poetry
Cover of Molly by Blake Butler

16. Molly

By: Blake Butler

3.66

Format: 320 pages, Paperback

A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century. … read more

Similar categories in Blake Butler's Molly book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

Cover of No Judgment: Essays by Lauren Oyler

17. No Judgment: Essays

By: Lauren Oyler

3.30

Format: 288 pages, Kindle Edition

From the national bestselling novelist and essayist, a groundbreaking collection of brand-new piece… read more

Similar categories in Lauren Oyler's No Judgment: Essays book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • short stories
"I’m told I should smoke more weed, which I don’t like, or else “do something nice for yourself,"

-Lauren Oyler, No Judgment: Essays

Cover of Wrong Norma by Anne Carson

18. Wrong Norma

By: Anne Carson

4.33

Format: None pages, Kindle Edition

As with her most recent publications, Wrong Norma is a facsimile edition of the original hand-desig… read more

Similar categories in Anne Carson's Wrong Norma book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • poetry
  • short stories
"Last thing: one Sunday evening about a year before all this we were on the telephone, my mother and I; it was just after we sold the house and she’d moved to the facility, where she was allowed a sma…"

-Anne Carson, Wrong Norma

Cover of The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan

19. The Hearing Test

By: Eliza Barry Callahan

3.40

Format: 162 pages, Hardcover

When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a dee… read more

Similar categories in Eliza Barry Callahan's The Hearing Test book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"He said that... helplessnes could give way to wonderful things, that helplessness looks like a very large net with very large holes and that I must be willing to trail that net in the sea for some be…"

-Eliza Barry Callahan, The Hearing Test

"He said that... helplessness could give way to wonderful things, that helplessness looks like a very large net with very large holes and that I must be willing to trail that net in the sea for some t…"

-Eliza Barry Callahan, The Hearing Test

Cover of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World by Ada Limon

20. You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

By: Ada Limon

4.11

Format: 176 pages, Hardcover

Published association  with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate o… read more

Similar categories in Ada Limon's You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • 21st century
  • poetry
  • anthologies
Cover of La vida por delante by Magalí Etchebarne

21. La vida por delante

By: Magalí Etchebarne

3.88

Format: 120 pages, Paperback

Un grupo de mujeres que se resiste a la sordidez de la vejez y la enfermedad; dos amigas de vacacio… read more

Similar categories in Magalí Etchebarne's La vida por delante book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • short stories
Cover of The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner

22. The Lights: Poems

By: Ben Lerner

3.84

Format: 128 pages, Hardcover

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School. … read more

Similar categories in Ben Lerner's The Lights: Poems book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • poetry
Cover of Emergency by Kathleen Alcott

23. Emergency

By: Kathleen Alcott

3.84

Format: 208 pages, Hardcover

A woman finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of an art … read more

Similar categories in Kathleen Alcott's Emergency book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • short stories
  • fiction
  • contemporary
Cover of Brat by Gabriel Smith

24. Brat

By: Gabriel Smith

3.53

Format: 320 pages, Hardcover

From a provocative new literary talent, a hilarious and haunted novel featuring an unlikable protag… read more

Similar categories in Gabriel Smith's Brat book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"I chose this one. This is the one I care about."

-Gabriel Smith, Brat

Cover of A Year of Last Things: Poems by Michael Ondaatje

25. A Year of Last Things: Poems

By: Michael Ondaatje

3.61

Format: 128 pages, Hardcover

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, where he began h… read more

Similar categories in Michael Ondaatje's A Year of Last Things: Poems book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • poetry
Cover of Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson

26. Like Love: Essays and Conversations

By: Maggie Nelson

3.76

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists Like Love is a… read more

Similar categories in Maggie Nelson's Like Love: Essays and Conversations book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • anthologies
Cover of The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya

27. The Hypocrite

By: Jo Hamya

3.55

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover

From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a nove… read more

Similar categories in Jo Hamya's The Hypocrite book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • 21st century
  • novels
"No stories are entirely imaginary, cherub, he'd said then. Everything is always a little bit real. Sometimes you steal things from other stories and change them until they work how you like."

-Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite

"The contradiction of the time had been the heightened moral obligation to consider other people as a means to keeping one's own self-interest afloat. Showing other people care meant avoiding them."

-Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite

"In the theatre's dark, he weighs up what to do out of love. There have been enough divergences so far for him to believe that Sophia's play is a self-contained thing that may only tangentially concer…"

-Jo Hamya, The Hypocrite

Cover of The Light Room by Kate Zambreno

28. The Light Room

By: Kate Zambreno

3.60

Format: 256 pages, Hardcover

“Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in clo… read more

Similar categories in Kate Zambreno's The Light Room book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

Cover of The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas

29. The Anthropologists

By: Aysegül Savas

4.05

Format: 192 pages, Hardcover

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should th… read more

Similar categories in Aysegül Savas's The Anthropologists book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary
Cover of Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams

30. Concerning the Future of Souls

By: Joy Williams

4.05

Format: 176 pages, Hardcover

“Quite possibly America's best living writer of short stories.”—NPR“Williams is a writer for our b… read more

Similar categories in Joy Williams's Concerning the Future of Souls book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • poetry
  • literary fiction
  • american
  • short stories
  • fiction
Cover of Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler

31. Banal Nightmare

By: Halle Butler

3.64

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, th… read more

Similar categories in Halle Butler's Banal Nightmare book and Lydia Davis's Our Strangers: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • novels
  • fiction
  • contemporary

18 Top contemporary books like Our Strangers: Stories by Lydia Davis

Transform Your Habits

All Fours

Miranda July

3.81

Transform Your Habits

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Lorrie Moore

3.31

Transform Your Habits

Roman Stories

Jhumpa Lahiri

3.80

Transform Your Habits

Blackouts

Justin Torres

3.77

View all the books

20 must-read fiction books like Tremor by Teju Cole

Transform Your Habits

Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck

3.46

Transform Your Habits

The Maniac

Benjamín Labatut

4.34

Transform Your Habits

Wandering Stars

Tommy Orange

3.89

Transform Your Habits

Day

Michael Cunningham

3.57

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