"Crotty's second collection shares the everyday struggles and joys of women and girls peppered through Middle America. There are no spectacles in these stories, and they are all the better for it. . . . 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; her characters make confident assumptions, feel surprised, back up, and reacquaint themselves with one another, becoming wiser and more tolerant with each misjudgment and readjustment." --Kirkus Reviews

"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

"I loved spending time with the narrators of these eight stories, people who pretend to misanthropy but are actually deeply in love with the world. Funny, soulful, wry, and more vulnerable than they intend to be, coming of age in the death throes of capitalism, at the rise of gender fluidity, doing their best to forge an identity at an increasingly precarious time." --Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

"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 of The Ivy Bookshop