Zadie Smith (ed.) - The Book of Other People

Table of Contents

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First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd. 2007
First published in the United States of America in Penguin Books 2007

Introduction and Hanwell Snr copyright Zadie Smith, 2007; Selection copyright 826NYC, 2007; Copyright David Mitchell, 2007; Copyright Daniel Clowes, 2007; Copyright A. L. Kennedy, 2007; Copyright ZZ Packer, 2007; Copyright Andrew OHagan, 2007; Copyright Nick Hornby, 2007; Copyright Posy Simmonds; Copyright Edwidge Danticat, 2007; Copyright Aleksandar Hemon, 2007: Copyright Chris Ware, 2007; Copyright Hari Kunzru, 2007; Copyright Toby Litt, 2007; Copyright Adam Thirlwell, 2007; Copyright Heidi Julavits, 2007; Copyright George Saunders, 2007; Copyright Jonathan Safran Foer, 2007; Copyright Vendela Vida, 2007; Copyright Miranda July, 2007; Copyright A. M. Homes, 2007; Copyright Dave Eggers, 2007; Copyright Jonathan Lethem, 2007; Copyright Colm Toibin, 2007; Copyright Andrew Sean Greer, 2007 All rights reserved

Gordon by Andrew OHagan, Hanwell Snr (as Hanwell Senior) by Zadie Smith, Magda Mandela by Hari Kunzru, Puppy by George Saunders, Roy Spivey by Miranda July, and Donal Webster by Colm Toibin first appeared in The New Yorker. Nigora by Adam Thirlwell and J. Johnson by Nick Hornby with illustrations by Posy Simmonds first appeared in The Guardian (London) . Cindy Stubenstock (as Fair Art) by A. M. Homes published in Exhibit-E, New York.

Publishers Note

These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
The book of other people / edited by Zadie Smith.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-20126-8

1. Short stories, American. 2. Short stories, English.
3. Characters and characteristics in literature. 4. FictionTechnique. I. Smith, Zadie.
PS648.S5B66 2007
823.018dc22 2007038785

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Introduction

The Book of Other People is about character. The instruction was simple: make somebody up . Each story was to be named after its character: Donal Webster by Colm Tibn, Cindy Stubenstock by A. M. Homes, Frank by A. L. Kennedy, and so on. When the commission was sent out, there were no rules about gender, race or species. This freedom resulted in The Monster by Toby Litt and Puppy by George Saunders. Late in the making of this book I tried to make a case for first and last names, for reasons of uniformity. The idea was not popular. Reproduced here is Edwidge Danticats protest, convincing in its simplicity: I think the variety of names is good. It makes it less monotonous-looking. Since people are named different things by different people. Surnames have not been forced upon Danticats Ll or Adam Thirlwells Nigora or on any others who did not want them. In one case, the omitted last name is the deliberate secret upon which the story hinges. In another - to use a distinction of Simone Weils - the character is a sacred human being and not a person or personality, and his particular name is not important.

There are twenty-three stories in this volume, too many to mention individually. Each is its own thing entirely. The book has no particular thesis or argument to convey about fictional character. Nor is straight realism or naturalism - if such things exist - the aim. The hope was that the finished book might be a lively demonstration of the fact that there are as many ways to create character (or deny the possibility of character) as there are writers. It is striking to see how one simple idea plays out in individual minds, the character of the prose itself being as differentiated as the other people with which these stories are nominally populated. As editor, I have tried to retain the individuality of each piece by leaving them, by and large, little changed.

There is, however, an element of their character that has been removed: the fonts. Publishers standardize fonts to suit the style of the house, but when writers deliver their stories by e-mail, each font tells its own story. There are quite a few writers in this volume who use variations on the nostalgic American Typewriter font (and they are all American), as if the ink were really wet and the press still hot. We have two users of the elegant, melancholic Didot font (both British), and a writer who centres the text in one long, thin strip down the page, like a newspaper column (and uses Georgia, a font that has an academic flavour). Some writers size their text in a gigantic 18. Others are more at home in a tiny 10. There are many strange, precise and seemingly intimate tics that disappear upon publication: paragraphs separated by pictorial symbols, titles designed just so, outsized speech marks, centred dialogue, un-centred paragraphs, no paragraphs at all. It seems a shame to lose these idiosyncratic layouts and their subtle effects. Anyway: I hope what remains will satisfy.

Before leaving you to the stories themselves, Id like to speak briefly of a technical matter, one that is usually considered to be in bad taste if you are speaking of the Art of Fiction: money. This book is a charity anthology, which means the editor must ask writers to work for free, knowing full well that a story is like a gas that expands into whatever available space one has. When you begin a story its impossible to say how much time will pass before youre able to finish it. It might take two hours of your time, or a few days, or four months, or more (this is particularly true for graphic novelists). So it was with this project. I want to thank all the writers for putting time aside - sometimes a great deal of time - to do something for nothing. Traditionally, writers denounce the very idea of writing for no remuneration (I dont want the world to give me anything for my books, George Eliot once said, except money to save me from the temptation of writing only for money), but maybe there is also an occasional advantage in writing once again as you wrote in the very beginning, when it was still simply writing and not also a strange breed of employment. It is liberating to write a piece that has no connection to anything else you write, that neednt be squished into a novel, or styled to fit the taste of a certain magazine, or designed in such a way as to please the kind of people who pay your rent. In The Book of Other People we find writers not only trying on different skins but also unlikely styles and variant attitudes, wandering into landscapes one would not have placed them in previously. I recommend them to you with the proviso that their order is simply alphabetical (by character). Each reader should line them up as they like.