Four Letter Word

by Joshua Knelman

  A. L. Kennedy has published five novels, two books of non-fiction, and four collections of short stories. She has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a number of prizes including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. She lives in Glasgow.

  Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967 and is one of the leading voices in Israeli literature and cinema. He has published four books of short stories and novellas, four graphic novels and one feature screenplay. His books, bestsellers in Israel, have been published in twenty-six different languages. His first film, Malka Red-Heart, won the Israeli ‘Oscar’ for best television drama, as well as acclaim at several international film festivals, and his most recent, Jellyfish, won the prestigious 2007 ‘Camera d’Or’ Award, at the 60th Cannes Festival. His first collection of stories to be published in the UK was The Nimrod Flip-Out and his second collection, Missing Kissinger, was published in 2007. Keret teaches in Ben Gurion University’s Hebrew Literature department.

  Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), and the short story collection Noise (2005). His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and won him prizes including the Somerset Maugham award, the Betty Trask Prize of the Society of Authors and a British Book Award. In 2003 Granta named him one of its Best of Young British novelists. He sits on the Executive Council of PEN and is a member of the editorial board of Mute magazine.

  Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Northern Ireland. He was a scholar at Cambridge University, spent a year at Harvard University as a Visiting Fellow and worked as a lawyer. He is the author of one novel, Utterly Monkey, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and his first poetry collection, To a Fault published by Faber, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best First Collection). He has received several prestigious awards for both poetry and fiction, including the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His poetry and reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review and the London Review of Books. He published a second poetry collection with Faber, On Purpose, in August 2007. He lives in Rome.

  Phil LaMarche’s first novel, American Youth, was hailed by the Guardian as being a ‘superbly edgy portrait of individual infighting and a community’s uneasy, prideful attitude towards gun culture and nationhood’. LaMarche was a writing fellow in the Syracuse University graduate creative writing program, awarded the Ivan Klíma Fellowship in fiction in Prague and a Summer Literary Seminars fellowship in St. Petersburg, Russia. His short story In the Tradition of My Family, was published in the 2005 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories anthology and has been made into a film by Later Productions. LaMarche lives in central New York State.

  Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, the daughter of writer Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. Le Guin is the author of more than three dozen books, including the multi-award-winning novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. She was awarded a Newbery Honor for the second volume of the Earthsea Cycle, The Tombs of Atuan, and among her many other distinctions are the Margaret A. Edwards Award, a National Book Award, and five Nebula Awards. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including Motherless Brooklyn (1999), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Salon Book Award and Esquire’s Novel of the Year, and The Fortress of Solitude (2003). His latest book of essays is The Disappointment Artist (2004). In September 2005, he was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the ‘genius grant’. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Sam Lipsyte’s most recent novel is Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book for 2005. He is also the author of The Subject Steve and Venus Drive. His work has appeared in many newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Quarterly, Open City, N+1, Slate, McSweeney’s, Esquire, Bookforum, the New York Times and the Washington Post. He teaches at Columbia University in New York City.

  Gautam Malkani was born in west London in 1976. He is a journalist at the Financial Times and is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Londonstani.

  Valerie Martin was born in Sedalia, Missouri, and grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, where her father was a sea-captain. She is the author of seven novels, including Mary Reilly, The Great Divorce, Italian Fever, and Property, three collections of short fiction, and a biography of St Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property). A new novel, Trespass, was published in 2007. Valerie Martin has taught in writing programmes at Mount Holyoke College, University of Massachusetts, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others. She resides in upstate New York.

  Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He has lived in the UK since 1986. His first novel, In the Country of Men, received praise from notable figures such as J.M. Coetzee and was shortlisted for both the Guardian First Book Award and the Booker Prize, and won the Commonwealth First Book Prize for Europe and South Asia, the RSL Ondaatje Award, the Vallonbrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize and the Slaiano International Literature Prize.

  Jan Morris is a Welsh writer and British historian born in 1926. Morris is considered one of the most influential travel writers in the world, best known for the trilogy Pax Britannica, a history of the British Empire, and for her detailed portraits of Venice, Oxford, Trieste and New York City. She is the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Wales and the University of Glamorgan. In 1999 Morris accepted the honour of Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Morris has published over two dozen books and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and a professor at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing and fine edition book production. She shows her artwork at Printworks Gallery in Chicago and is the author of a number of novel-length visual books and the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife (2004) which was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004 and won the Sainsbury’s popular fiction award at the British Book Awards in 2006. The recipient of numerous grants, she lives in Chicago.

  Jeff Parker has published one novel, Ovenman, and his stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006, Ploughshares, Tin House, Hobart and many other publications. He collaborated with artist William Powhida on a collection of stories and images called The Back of the Line. With Mikhail Iossel he edited the anthology Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, and he is the Russia Programme Director of Summer Literary Seminars in St Petersburg. Parker teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.

  Francine Prose is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including, most recently, A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities such as Harvard, Iowa, Columbia, Arizona and the New School. She is a distinguished critic and essayist, the recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Prose lives in New York City.

  James Robertson is the author of three novels, The Fanatic (2000), Joseph Knight (2003), which was awarded the two major Scottish literary awards in 2003–2004 – the Saltire Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year – and The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. He has also published stories, poetry, anthologies and essays. He served as the Scottish Parliament’s first writer in residence in 2004 and was selected for a prestigious Creative Scotland Award in March 2006. He lives in Angus.

  Graham Roumieu is the creator of In Me O
wn Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot (2003), Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir (2005) and the forthcoming Teenstache, Bigfoot: I Not Dead and 101 Ways To Kill Your Boss. Roumieu’s illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s and the Wall Street Journal and his work has received recognition from the Society of Publication Designers, the Society of Illustrators New York, American Illustration, and Communication Arts.

  Mandy Sayer won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award with her first novel, Mood Indigo. Since then, she has been named one of Australia’s Best Young Novelists by the Sydney Morning Herald and has published seven books, including the memoir Dreamtime Alice, which has been translated into several languages and won the National Biography Award. In 2006, her second memoir, Velocity, won the South Australian Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and The Age Book of the Year Award. Her latest novel, The Night has a Thousand Eyes, is a literary thriller of three children on the run from their murderous father. Sayer has BA and MA from Indiana University and a Doctrate from the University of Technology, Sydney. She lives in Sydney.

  Lionel Shriver has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, among other publications. She is the author of eight novels, including We Need To Talk About Kevin (2005) which won the Orange Prize in 2005, and The Post-Birthday World, published by HarperCollins in 2007. She lives in London and New York.

  Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. He has written five collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992; his second book of short stories, Is This the Way You Said?, appeared in 2006 to critical acclaim, and his most recent novel, Between Each Breath, in 2007. He lives in France with his wife and three children.

  Miriam Toews was born in Steinbach, Manitoba in 1964 and currently lives in Winnipeg. She writes both fiction and non-fiction in the genres of novel, memoir, magazine, newspaper and radio and her books include Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding; Swing Low: A Life and, most recently, A Complicated Kindness which was shortlisted for the 2004 Giller Prize and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2005.

  Carl-Johan Vallgren was born in 1964. He is a musician and the author of eight books, including The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-reading Monster Hercules Barefoot. His novels have been published in twenty-one countries. He currently lives in Stockholm.

  M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including The Gunny Sack, winner of a Commonwealth Prize, The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, both winners of the Giller Prize. His most recent novel is The Assassin’s Song. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.

  Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of the novels Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Boating for Beginners, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, The PowerBook, Lighthousekeeping, Written on the Body, Art and Lies, Gut Symmetries; a book of short stories, The World and Other Places; two books for children, The King of Capri and Tanglewreck; and a book of essays about art and culture, Art Objects. Her latest book is The Stone Gods.

  Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden (2002) and The Pajamaist (2006). He is also the co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (2007). His poems and translations have appeared in many publications, including the Boston Review, Open City, Bomb, the New Republic and The New Yorker. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the New School, and works as an editor with Wave Books. In autumn 2007 he became a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas. He lives in New York City.

  Juli Zeh was born in 1974 in Bonn. She has worked for the UN in New York, Krakow and Zagreb, and now lives in Leipzig. Her first novel, Adler und Engel (Eagles and Angels, 2001) was awarded the Deutschen Bücherpreis for best first novel, the Bremer Literaturpreis, and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for the best novel by a German-speaking author. Her writing has been translated into over twenty languages.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to Poppy Hampson – for skilful editing and sympathy – and Alison Samuel at Chatto & Windus, Rachel Cugnoni, Beth Coates and Liz Foley at Vintage, Jane Kirby and Monique Corless in the Random House rights department, Louise Dennys, Michael Schellenberg and Angelika Glover at Knopf Canada, Amber Qureshi at Free Press, Martin Knelman, Bernadette Sulgit, Sara Knelman, Becky Toyne, Bernard Schiff, David Berlin, Deborah Kirshner, Antonio De Luca, Brian Morgan, Eric Pierni, Catherine Osborne, Robin Robertson and Jess Atwood Gibson. A special thank you to Leonard Cohen, whose writing on love is inspiring, and a deep bow to Margaret Atwood, whose support for this idea has been invaluable. Most of all we are enormously grateful to the contributors.

  Joshua Knelman is an award-winning writer and editor, and a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto.

  Rosalind Porter is an editor at Granta magazine. She lives in London.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2008

  Selection copyright © 2007 Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter

  Introduction copyright © 2007 Rosalind Porter

  Published by arrangement with Chatto & Windus, one of the publishers in the Random House Group Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008, and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, a division of The Random House Group, London. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Individual contributions copyright by the authors. Copyright © 2007 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; © 2007 Anonymous; © 2007 O.W. Toad Ltd; © 2007 Chris Bachelder; © 2007 Peter Behrens; © 2005 David Bezmozgis; © 2007 Joseph Boyden; © 2005 Tessa Brown; © 2007 Leonard Cohen; © 2005 Douglas Coupland; © 2007 Geoff Dyer; © 2007 Michel Faber; © 2007 Neil Gaiman; © 2007 Damon Galgut; © 2007 Panos Karnezis; © 2007 A. L. Kennedy; © 1992 Etgar Keret (translation © 2007 Miriam Shlesinger); © 2007 Hari Kunzru; © 2007 Phil LaMarche; © 2007 Nick Laird; © 2007 Ursula K. Le Guin; © 2005 Jonathan Lethem; © 2007 Sam Lipsyte; © 2007 Gautam Malkani; © 2007 Valerie Martin; © 2007 Hisham Matar; © 2007 Jan Morris; printed with the permission of Regal Literary as agent for Audrey Niffenegger. Copyright © 2007 Audrey Niffenegger; © 2007 Jeff Parker; © 2007 Francine Prose; © 2007 James Robertson; © 2007 Graham Roumieu; © 2007 Mandy Sayer; © 2007 Lionel Shriver; © 2007 Adam Thorpe; © 2007 Miriam Toews; © 2007 Carl-Johan Vallgren (translation © 2007 Sarah Death); © 2005 M.G. Vassanji; © 2007 Jeanette Winterson; © 2007 Matthew Zapruder; © 2005 Juli Zeh (translation © 2005 Judith Orban).

  Some material in this collection has been previously published as follows: ‘Lubyanka, 2 September 1918’ by David Bezmozgis; ‘Diamonds and Soot’ by Douglas Coupland; ‘Give Up’ by Jonathan Lethem; ‘You Would Look Away’ by M.G. Vassanji and ‘Love In Eight Chapters’ by Juli Zeh in The Walrus in July, 2005. And ‘In Reference to your Recent Communications’ by Tessa Brown in Harper’s in May, 2005.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Four letter word : original love letters / edited by Rosalind Porter & Joshua Knelman.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36973-4

  1. Love-letters—Fiction. 2. Imaginary letters. 3. English fiction—21st century.

  4. American fiction—21st century. 5. Commonwealth fiction

  (English)—21st century. I. Porter, Rosalind II. Knelman, Joshua

  PN6140.L7F69 2008 82
3′.08508 C2008-900451-5

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