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Items13
1
84, Charing Cross Road (1970)
8.4/10on Open Library
Published
Hanff writes to a London bookshop to order books she cannot easily find in New York. The business letters turn into an exchange that includes gifts, jokes, and news of people around the shop. Read them in order to see when Frank Doel’s replies begin to carry a friendship as well as an order.
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Words in Air (2008)
Published
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell wrote to one another about poems, drafts, and their lives. The later letters show how the friendship can hold sustained criticism even when they disagree about what belongs in a poem. Read across the years for the difference between finding a sympathetic reader and learning to argue with one.
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Between Father and Son (2000)
Published
The letters follow a son studying in England and a father writing from Trinidad. Seepersad and V. S. Naipaul encourage one another’s writing, while the family correspondence records the immediate problems of living apart. Read for the way an exchange about getting by also becomes an exchange between writers.
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The Delicacy and Strength of Lace
James Wright writes to Leslie Marmon Silko about her book Ceremony. The letters grow into a short, close friendship, with stories and ordinary news making their way into an exchange that began with a reader’s praise. Anne Wright’s edition gives the brief correspondence room to unfold.
More about The Delicacy and Strength of Lace5
Between Friends (1995)
Published
Arendt and Mary McCarthy write across decades about their work, politics, travel, and daily life. The collection shows how a friendship is kept alive through ordinary news as much as through discussion of published arguments. The later letters are worth reading against the beginning, when their exchange was still finding its range.
More about Between Friends6
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (2002)
Published
The collection moves from courtship into a marriage lived partly through separations. Zelda’s early letters carry much of the courtship story because most of Scott’s from those years are lost. The notes from editors Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks help put the changing tone in the circumstances of both writers.
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Love Letters: Vita and Virginia
The early letters show Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West getting to know one another as writers. The exchanges become more intimate, and the collection continues after the first intensity of their affair. Read across those periods to see how the tone of their relationship changes without their interest in each other’s work disappearing.
More about Love Letters: Vita and Virginia8
My Dearest Friend (2010)
Published
Abigail and John Adams write to each other while politics and public duties keep them apart. Household decisions and arguments about public life can occupy the same exchange. Follow the letters through the absences to see how each comes to rely on the perspective the other has from a different place.
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The Mahatma And The Poet (1999)
Published
Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore address each other with affection while disagreeing over questions of politics and social change. The editor places private letters beside public debates. Reading those forms together shows how an argument changes when the other person is a correspondent and when the audience is a wider public.
More about The Mahatma And The Poet 10
Sister love (2018)
Published
Audre Lorde and Pat Parker began corresponding regularly several years after meeting. The letters make room for poems, work, friendships, and illness within the same exchange. Reading over time lets you see how two writers become practical sources of encouragement and care for each other.
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Here and Now (2013)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
J. M. Coetzee proposes that he and Auster write to one another regularly. The letters give that plan a life of its own, moving through subjects such as sport and friendship. Read the opening exchange and then a later disagreement to see how a deliberately started correspondence becomes a place to think aloud.
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Albert Einstein/Mileva Marić--the love letters (1992)
Published
The letters begin while Einstein and Mileva Marić are students and extend to shortly after they marry. Scientific talk shares space with worries about money and finding work. Read across the years to see how the relationship changes as the two make decisions about their working and family lives.
More about Albert Einstein/Mileva Marić--the love letters13
Native sons (2004)
Published
The correspondence in this book concentrates on James Baldwin and Sol Stein’s work around the publication of Notes of a Native Son. Stein’s recollections and the letters give two different ways to approach the friendship. Follow the actual exchanges to see what the work of editing asks of a relationship.
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