Abstract
Dear Thomas K.: Sorry I didn’t answer your unexpected letter of May 8th, 1989, before, but I was quite surprised by it and needed some time to process its content. How would you have reacted if a perfect stranger astonished you the same way? I’ll tell you how I did: I loved finding a Luftpost envelope in my mailbox, stamped in the Deutsche Demokratischer Republik. Surprises nowadays come in the form of a telephone call. The epistolary genre is agonizing; nobody wants to communicate through writing anymore, so romance and friendship, trapped in the technological wire, are losing a poetic side.
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© 1996 Ilan Stavans
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Stavans, I. (1996). Letter to a German Friend. In: Art and Anger. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06033-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06033-4_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-312-24031-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-06033-4
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