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 Tóibín, ‘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 Danticat’s 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 Danticat’s ‘Lélé’ or Adam Thirlwell’s ‘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 Weil’s - 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, I’d 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 it’s impossible to say how much time will pass before you’re 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 don’t 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 needn’t be