Department
Letters
The 27-year correspondence between two amateur Borges translators, fan letters to dead authors, the postscript as form.
The Letters of Mavis Gallant to Her Editor
A small archive at the New York Public Library holds Mavis Gallant's working correspondence with her New Yorker editor across thirty-four years. The letters are an education in how a story gets made.
The Condolence Letter After the Internet
What happens to the most difficult of all the personal-letter forms when most condolence now happens in a comment thread, a text message, or not at all.
The Postcard as a Prose Form
An argument that the postcard, constrained by space and exposed to every reader along the way, has produced some of the most precise prose of the twentieth century.
The Letters Rilke Did Not Send
A new edition collects the drafts Rilke wrote and then withheld. The book complicates the figure of the great letter writer in interesting and uncomfortable ways.
Long-Running Correspondences in the Digital Age
Three contemporary letter writers describe how they have kept a sustained correspondence going across email, paper, and the years between.
The Postscript as a Literary Form
The PS, the second PS, the marginal note added in different ink: a brief defense of the most undervalued unit in the history of the personal letter.
Fan Letters to the Dead
A small archive at a Welsh public library holds eighteen hundred letters written to authors who could not read them. The collection is stranger and more honest than it sounds.
The Borges Translators of Rosario and Utrecht
For twenty-seven years, an Argentine architect and a Dutch civil servant exchanged drafts of the same Borges stories. The archive is now at a small university in Saskatchewan.