What He's Poised to Do

ALEX: I had always been a fan of Ben’s writing, as far back as Superbad, and I met him at a party in Brooklyn. I was talking to Ben’s wife, Gail, not knowing she was married to him, and I happened to mention that I dug Ben Greenman. She said, “That’s my husband. Hey, Ben, come meet a fan!” I thought she was kidding, but there he was. We immediately started talking about doing a book together. At that time, Aaron Petrovich and I had done a few titles with Hotel St. George, but we were looking to shift from trade paperback to handmade letterpress books. We wanted to work more directly with our authors, to go beyond just taking a manuscript and putting it between covers. We wanted layout and typography to reflect or amplify the themes of the book.

BEN: This would have been at the beginning of 2008. I had a novel, Please Step Back, coming out in 2009. I didn’t want to shoehorn in another traditional book in the midst of that schedule, but the idea of doing a nontraditional book really appealed to me.

ALEX: Right. We pretty quickly realized that the running theme of letters was a way to unite these stories into a collection, but then we had to decide what “collection” meant. These were also great stories about human interaction, thwarted love affairs, rivalries, disappointments, and enduring love, and I noticed that there were invisible threads that connected the stories.

CAL: What do you mean by invisible threads?

BEN: Yeah. What do you mean?

ALEX: I just thought that sounded cool. No: themes would recur, as in any collection, but in interesting ways. There was the story about a man who came from Cuba to the United States and continued to write letters to the woman he loved there, even after she was out of his life; to me, that seemed connected to another story, about a guy in Nebraska who was grappling with a troubled marriage. When Ben came up with the idea that these weren’t connections, but correspondences, that gave us an organizing principle and a title: Correspondences.

BEN: It probably started as a pun, but then it turned into something much richer—thanks in large part to the design. Alex and Aaron designed a box with four foldout panels; each panel held a little accordion book, and each little accordion book contained two stories. Those were the pairs of stories that I saw as corresponding with each other, just as the characters in the stories advanced their lives by corresponding with each other. And then we came up with the Postcard Project to complete the package.

CAL: Tell us more about that.

ALEX: When we designed the case, it was meant to hold eight stories in four accordion books. Then one afternoon we started talking about the fact that the box was a very exclusive form. It folded up. There was a bellyband around it. It kept people out, in some way. As a remedy, Ben suggested writing a story that was intentionally incomplete and inviting readers to contribute to it. We printed that story, “What He’s Poised to Do,” on the actual casing, and then we put a postcard in the fourth pocket, where the fourth booklet would have gone. The reader got to write back to us, the publisher, to complete the story. We posted some of the responses to the Mail Room of the Hotel St. George Web site.

BEN: People loved that Postcard Project.

ALEX: I think it brought in a different kind of appreciation. Because the box was a high-end, limited-edition object, I thought we’d get attention from design magazines and book blogs. We did. But then there were all the people who seized on the idea of the Postcard Project as an interactive fiction experiment. Which was cool, but also a little frightening. When something sounds “high concept,” people sometimes assume it’s not superior to a description of itself—that it doesn’t transcend its own novelty.

CAL: Funny you should say that, because that’s how I encountered it. I was out in Los Angeles on business with Carrie Kania, our publisher, and we went into Book Soup, the wonderful bookstore on Sunset, and both of us were exploring the store, looking for hidden treasures. At one moment or another, each of us separately stumbled across an elaborate endcap display the store had devoted to Correspondences. I was astonished by the innovative approach to the form and the intricacy of the package. But I didn’t buy it then, in part because I was worried about crushing it in my luggage, but also because I was feeling protective of it. I knew Carrie would love it the way I did—this is the kind of thing we’re always driving each other crazy with—but I felt such a sense of discovery, and I wanted to be able to order it when we got back and present it to her as if out of nowhere. Back in New York, I walked into Carrie’s office, and there was a copy on her desk. She’d bought it at Book Soup and hadn’t mentioned it to me.

BEN: It’s like an O. Henry story.