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Other People's Mail Edited by Gail Pool Letter writing, both as art and as
pastime, has declined in the past hundred years. Before our lively involvement
with e-mail, it seemed that written correspondence might entirely
disappear. Yet in fiction, throughout the era, epistolary stories have
thrived. Cast as love letters and Dear John
letters, as thank-you notes and suicide notes, as memos, letters to the
editor, and exchanges with the IRS, these stories have been published by the
hundreds, the work of many of our best-known authors. Clearly, writers
have found the letter tale compelling, and they know that readers do as
well: Who, after all, is immune to the seduction of reading other
people's mail? Other People's Mail offers
17 modern letter stories, written by a culturally diverse group of authors
from Canada, England, Palestine, Sweden, Argentina, South Africa, Southern
Rhodesia, Poland, and the United States. These tales are variously
comic, satirical, poignant, or tragic. They are letters written from
the Canadian wilderness, from a private school in Geneva, from a
concentration camp, from beyond the grave. What they share is the
epistolary form: each story This is an original anthology, the
first of its kind. Most of the stories and many of the writers
will be new to readers. The tales themselves--ingenious, playful,
in every sense unusual--offer insight into the nature of storytelling and are
also, above all, a pleasure to read. |
