Correspondences

First, we’d like to tell you about the stories contained in Greenman’s new collection, largely because once we get started on the packaging, we might never stop. As the title suggests, the book is largely concerned with characters working out their issues long-distance. In “Life Begins in Benighted Nonexistence and Hey! It Goes From There,” French army captain Claude-Etienne Minié—who invented the bullet known as the minié ball during an 1847 African campaign—writes his annual letter to his daughter. In it, he tells of the bullet’s provenance and gently speaks of his admiration for a fellow officer and how the officer’s deathbed cries for an ex-lover informed Minié’s choice of his daughter’s name. In another story, the owner of a “karmic boomerang” shop who has converted it into a self-help academy cannot overcome the sadness over his first love’s marriage to another man.

In the past, we’ve found Greenman’s fiction coolly funny—self-consciously humorous in a way that accidentally drains some of the heart from his stories. Which is not to say they weren’t enjoyable, just that they never hit home the way we wished they would. Turns out, the easy fix is to letterpress them onto fine paper, crease the sheets like accordions and slip them into a beautifully designed, unfurling cardboard box (which also has a story printed along its various flaps). Something about the tactile, interactive nature of Correspondences immediately sparks that connection we’d missed in his previous work. The story printed on the box, “What He’s Poised to Do,” features a man caught in a tidal conflict in his marriage, unable to decide whether to return to his wife. We crawl deeper inside the box as the story continues, and the peeling away of the metaphorical layers in the story becomes literal.

To further lure the reader in, Greenman marked off several moments in the story when the protagonist writes a postcard home to his wife. Readers are invited to actually write the postcard they imagine the man writing, and send it to Greenman for possible inclusion in a later version of the story. Remarkably, everything ties together organically, rather than reading as a gimmick. As an object, Correspondences is a genius invention. But as a book, it works just as well.

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