About the Book

Near Strangers is a collection of eight tightly crafted short stories with unexpected connections. These stories center on resilient female protagonists and offer a view into queer life in America outside of its major coastal cities. The characters in Marian Crotty’s collection are searching—for understanding, acceptance, or forgiveness. In the title story, an elderly rape crisis volunteer’s advocacy for a survivor leads her to reexamine her role in estrangement from her son; in “Halloween,” a queer teen is counseled through heartbreak by her unlucky-in-love grandmother; and in “Family Resemblance,” a group of families whose children share the same sperm donor is disrupted by the arrival of a minor celebrity. While marginalization, loneliness, and bigotry hover in the distance of Near Strangers, the book’s tone is hopeful and invites readers to reflect on our shared human experience with empathy.

Praise for Near Strangers 

Featured in Electric Lit‘s “15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Winter”

“What I like most about this story is what I like about the whole collection. Crotty is a writer who is fair to all her characters. Everyone is suffering, making mistakes born of fear and sadness, and everyone is fighting to be decent, to be moral in a society that has lost its center, to do the right thing even though there might not be any more right things to do.”
—Pam Houston, from Electric Lit Feature

“There are no spectacles in these stories, and they are all the better for it. The characters, many of them queer, are familiar, well meaning, and flawed. The conflicts they face range from universal to less common, including first heartbreak, rocky transitions into adulthood, losing an infant, and surviving sexual assault. . . . Crotty repeatedly signals that it is not just all right, but good, to realize your perception of someone is fundamentally misaligned with their perception of themself.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The stories here should appeal to readers of traditional, well-wrought literary fiction, and in particular to fans of LGBTQ fiction. I was reminded of fine stories by Tessa Hadley and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, but Crotty has a voice all her own.”
—Colorado Review

“Near Strangers is a gorgeous collection, full of vivid and memorable characters who find a clarity in making themselves visible and a path forward in wanting to believe that the world is capable of better than what they’ve seen from it. Marian Crotty’s stories expertly balance the sharp realities of cruelty and disappointment with the human capacity for joy, curiosity and finding possibility in the impossible.”
—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

“These stories begin with questions about grief, sex, and faith but end with undeniable truths about obsession and delusion. They stare fearlessly into the soft violence of girlhood.”
—Venita Blackburn, author of Dead in Long Beach, California

“A beautiful collection, raw and particular and surprising. From the electricity of adolescent lust to a middle school essay on Anne Frank, the throughline in these stories is the deep challenge of intimacy, its aspiration, and its compromise. Crotty’s stories reminded me of how inevitable it is that we fail to reach each other fully and how essential it is to try.”
—Emma Snyder, Owner, The Ivy Bookshop

Marian Crotty is the author of the short story collection What Counts as Love, which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as the Kenyon Review, The Sun, Ploughshares, and Best American Short Stories 2020. She has a BA […]

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