Word on the literary street is that Ben Greenman — whose website, oddly enough, resembles a bank’s — is coming out with a new short story collection in October. Correspondences is aptly named: the book includes postcards for reader response and interaction. It’s also a limited edition letterpress, with three accordion books (which starts to sound like a McSweeney’s publication).
The seventh story in the collection is deliberately written with nine parts missing. Readers have the opportunity to fill in their own version of the missing parts on the postcards provided, and mail them to the publisher Hotel St. George. Winners might have their postcards inserted into the story in future editions.
I suppose this is an ingenious next step for the epistolary tale, as authors and readers collaborate. It’s also, surely coincidentally, a wonderful marketing plan. Roland Barthes’ notion of the Death of the Author has many implications far beyond just collaboration, but at least in this case, the line between the author/reader has been quite blurred, as both switch roles.
Really, Correspondences mirrors the type of interaction that readers have come to expect on the internet. If a journalist writes an online article, readers want to be able to comment on it, but readers expect books to be rather fusty, uni-directional things. This book tinkers with that expectation.
A press release for the book:
CORRESPONDENCES provides a bittersweet glimpse at the lost art of letter-writing, and the manner and means by which emotions are conveyed in that form. The collection contains seven stories, all of which, in one way or another, speak to the disintegrating relationship between people–men and women, parents and children, authors and readers.
