Stories from a Stranger: Every Person Has a Story

Social media personality Prosper brings his online video series to the page in this earnest if sappy survey of contemporary life. The project was first conceived in 2020, when, working as an ICU nurse during the Covid-19 pandemic, Prosper, a normally gregarious man, coped with the trauma by disengaging from his patients. To regain a sense of connection, he began interviewing strangers on the street and posting the interviews online. The stories in this volume are not reproductions of online content, however, but new. Each section is organized around a question (e.g., “Who was your greatest love, and why did you fall in love with them?”) and includes answers from the strangers, accompanied by photographs of them talking. In book form, however, the project lacks a certain dynamism (screen grabs of interviewees mid-sentence feel less dignified than portraits would be), and the stories themselves give little sign that much work was done to pick the wheat from the chaff. (One respondent says of their mantra “just breathe”: “It’s very simple and to the point—not everything needs to be a Robert Frost poem”). To the extent that Prosper contextualizes the stories, he mostly does so in clichés (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”; “We’re more alike than different”). The result is sometimes moving but overall too squishy and inconsistent. (Sept.)