This liquid modern world of ours, like all liquids, cannot standstill and keep its shape for long. Everything keeps changing - thefashions we follow, the events that intermittently catch ourattention, the things we dream of and things we fear. And we, theinhabitants of this world in flux, feel the need to adjust to itstempo by being ?flexible' and constantly ready to change. Wewant to know what is going on and what is likely to happen, butwhat we get is an avalanche of information that threatens tooverwhelm us. How are we to sift the information that really matters from theheaps of useless and irrelevant rubbish? How are we to derivemeaningful messages from senseless noise? We face the daunting task of trying to distinguish the importantfrom the insubstantial, distil the things that matter from falsealarms and flashes in the pan. Nothing escapes scrutiny so stubbornly as the ordinary things ofeveryday life, hiding in the light of deceptive and misleadingfamiliarity. To turn them into objects of attention and scrutiny,they must first be torn out from that daily routine: the apparentlyfamiliar must be made strange. This is precisely what ZygmuntBauman seeks to do in these 44 letters: each tells a story drawnfrom ordinary lives, but tells it in order to reveal anextraordinariness that we might otherwise overlook. Arresting, revealing, disconcerting, these snapshots of life bythe most brilliant analyst of our liquid modern world will appealto a wide readership.