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The Book of Other People
Edited by Zadie Smith
Penguin, 287 pages, $15 paper
“The instruction was simple: make somebody up,” Zadie Smith (“On Beauty”) explained in her introduction. The invitation to contribute to this anthology resulted in 23 stories, by such authors as Daniel Clowes, Nick Hornby and Heidi Julavits who provided their work free of charge to benefit 826 New York, a non-profit tutoring and writing program for youth. The result is an engaging collection. “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.
