THE SMALL PRESS / Letter Perfect ALL EDITIONS

• Published in: Newsday
• Main Author: Sylvia Brownrigg. Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of a novel, "The Metaphysical Touch." Her short story collection, "Ten Women Who Shook the World," will be published this spring
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 03.03.2000
• Edition: Combined editions
• Subjects: Gordimer, Nadine (1923-2014)

This has given letters great appeal to storytellers, as Gail Pool notes in the introduction to her lively and entertaining anthology, "Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories." Pool discusses the way "letter stories," as she calls them, have an enticing immediacy, promising a reader both the personal story contained within the letter or letters, and the broader story of how these letters came to be. Pool, intrigued by the fictional possibilities in letters and their persistence in modern novels (such as "The Color Purple") has collected a wide range of international stories that exploit different aspects of the form. As with any themed anthology, "Other People's Mail" makes for uneven reading. Humorous stories include a nice Wodehousian turn by A.A. Milne on the perils of book borrowing; and Ray Russell's "Evil Star," a sharp, Updike-like satire on writers' vanity in the form of a libel lawyer's letter to the author of a vituperative critique of a fellow novelist ("While it may be perfectly true that certain aspects of his lifestyle are indicators of 'impotence or other sexual dysfunction' rather than the 'prowess he publicly professes,' there is no way you can satisfactorily prove this"). Stephen Dixon has a characteristically wry contribution in "Man of Letters," a series of break-up missives from Newt to his girlfriend, Em, which start short and emphatic and become, as the equivocating man fails to send them, ever more obsessive and poetically fanciful- until the piece ends, on a perfect comic contradiction.