Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories (Volume 1) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826212468 ISBN 13: 9780826212467

Publisher: University of Missouri, 2000

Synopsis

While the art and craft of letter writing have declined in this century, letter 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 United States Post Office, examples of epistolary fiction have been published by the hundreds, among them the work of many of our most notable authors. Why has this form of fiction writing remained so popular? As Gail Pool answers, "Who, after all, is immune to the seduction of reading other people's mail?"

Although epistolary fiction enjoyed its greatest popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when letters were central to daily life, this style of writing has a decidedly postmodern air. Letter stories are about communication, and they are effective in framing our modern concerns: the struggle to find meaningful stories, relationships, and lives amid the social and moral disarray of the era and the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, artist and audience, private and public domains. These are the themes of our time, and the themes of the stories in Other People's Mail.

Offering seventeen stories written by a culturally diverse group of authors, Other People's Mail represents what letter tales, at their best, can do. They may be written from the Canadian wilderness, a private school in Geneva, a concentration camp, or beyond the grave. They may be comic or satirical, poignant or tragic, but all are united in their distinctive format.

The first collection of its kind, Other People's Mail is a unique and important anthology. Pool's highly informative introduction explores the nature of letter fiction, and her individual preface to each story provides background information on both the author and the tale. A select listing additional letter stories rounds out the anthology. Literature and writing instructors in search of a fresh approach to stories and readers looking for an anthology with a lively theme will enjoy this collection.

About this title

About the Author:

About the Editor

As a book critic, Gail Pool has long been fascinated by letter stories. As a reader, she has enjoyed them. And as a writing instructor, she has used them for reading and writing assignments. She is the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Captivating stories in an anthology of epistolary fiction from the last 50 years. While the word epistolary may evoke memories of such 18th-century classics as Samuel Richardsons Pamela, Pool (Writing/Radcliffe Seminars) proves the letter story to be a truly modern, and perhaps even postmodern, form of prose. The 17 pieces she includes and individually introduces (all of them previously published) are from such notable authors as Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, and Julio Cort zar, who supply perhaps the strangest and most intense stories in the collection. Correspondence in a Canadian town suggests insanity and murder in Munros A Wilderness Station; in Gordimers Letter From His Father, Hermann Kafka writes an enraged response to his sons famous complaint; and in Cort zars Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, a man house-sitting for a female friend confesses to her that he tends to vomit bunnies. The unknown, the impossible, and the bizarre assume a new resonance when the text is addressed to someone specific, as the stories entangle the perspectives and imaginations of letters recipients and their writers. Each piece is, as the anthologys title suggests, intriguingly voyeuristic and touchingly personal. Sad and intimate letters are written to lovers from the brink of suicide and from concentration camps. Virginia Moriconis Simple Arithmetic presents letters between a father and his clever, poor-spelling, big-spending son at boarding school, and in Gail Godwins False Lights, a young woman sends a brave yet inappropriate letter to her husbands first wifeand receives a surprising response. The only possible omission: a story featuring an e-mail chat. Warning: Reading these fantastic letters might make your own next trip to the mailbox seem a bore. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0826212468
• ISBN 13: 9780826212467
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Pool Gail