It began when I was a girl, with books like Jean Webster's Daddy Long Legs and Norma Fox Mazer's I, Trissy. These stories invited me directly into characters' private thoughts, via letters written to a trusted recipient and journal entries written for the writer's own eyes. Trans. Katharina Bielenberg
B.I.P.'s Snips are short-hand responses to works; I usually opt for this format when I've read the book without taking many (or any) notes. Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) Read: Mostly over breakfast, home-baked muffins or bakery-bought rugelach with coffee, perched on a stool in the kitchen, mostly
The Love Letter was longlisted in 1996, the year that Helen Dunmore's The Spell of Winter won the Orange Prize. The idea intrigued me straight away, even before I saw the 1999 film of the same name: a love letter addressed and signed ambiguously, discovered by a 42-year-old
Natalia Ginzburg's The City and the House (1985) Trans. Dick Davis This was Natalia Ginzburg's last published book, an epistolary work, which contains letters sent by a handful of Italian men and women who are struggling to understand their attachments to (and distances from) one another, those in
You've been filled with talk of letters since my Dear Autumn letter on the Equinox. It all began with one of my favourite collections of letters, written between two friends: Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 The Story of a Remarkable Friendship (Ed. Martha Freeman,
