Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
There was the woman sitting in the movie theater a few seats away. I glanced at her and saw myself. My Doppelganger. Did she recognize me, as well?And the older lady who sat down at my table in the downtown mall food court, an academic who told me that every culture has a sandwich, a meal wrapped in something.And most of all, the woman who saw the child me standing in front of the toys in the grocery store, contemplating the cellophane bags of plastic cowboys and Indians and knights on horses an...
I have now become the reader who goes to the library to pick up a book - and leaves with that one and three more. I chose this one on a whim. The results were unexpected.If nothing else, these stories will take you to back to these random moments with random people in your life. A travel or an airport or a park or a museum or a store, anywhere you had a random interaction with a total stranger, sometimes unbelievably short, but somehow you remember the incident year after year. This book is a co...
Book Review: To A Stranger: Essays To The Ones That Haunt Us edited by Colleen KinderWhen Walt Whitman wrote the poem To A Stranger over 160 years ago he examined the connection between people who are previously unknown to each other. This collection of essays takes it one step further and asks sixty-five writers to create a letter to a stranger from their past. Each essay is unique and authentic and leaves the reader wondering, “who are the strangers that shaped me and what would I say to that
This is a wonderful collection of letters written to people with whom the authors had chance encounters or special brief connections. I especially like the one written by the poet Kiki Petrosino about the time after her graduation when she lived with her grandmother.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. Here's my review. Letters to a Stranger is a book of essays/letters where writers focus on chance encounters that impacted their lives. The premise is interesting and made me think about random encounters in my own life. The execution was uneven. Some of the essays are interesting, touching, funny, emotionally resonant. Some aren't. It's a mixed bag. Which is true of almost any anthology. I think, in the end, that what this book shows is that our en...
I have always found unsent letters fascinating, and have written quite a few in my life. These snapshots into the writer’s world exemplify the intimate impact strangers unknowingly have on us all. We all have had random encounters that make us think twice, question ourselves, or connect to something deep within. LETTER TO A STRANGER embraces the rawness of the human soul and the reflective introspection into the subtle effects of the world on us.
What a fascinating project! The form and content of the letters are perhaps as diverse as the origins of the letters themselves. Yet, at the same time, there are common themes and a universality running through all of them. All themes are ideas the reader can relate to, and all trigger an emotion. The form of the book itself triggers an emotion. Throughout this book, as I read letter after letter, strangers who touched my life come to mind. Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks...
As soon as I read the description for this book I thought it sounded so intriguing. I found myself skimming over some stories and no judgement to those people but they didn’t hold my interest. A great book idea.
DNF. Read about half of it. I would think that letters would be more carefully crafted. While some were interesting, mostly it was more about the writer than the stranger so it became navel gazing. Perhaps that's what looking at a stranger is: looking at why the stranger intrigued us. But, ultimatly, that wasn't enough to hold my interest until the end.
There is the commonly held notion that people come into our lives for a reason. Maybe it is for a season, maybe for a reason as the saying goes. In Colleen Kinder’s book LETTER TO A STRANGER, she presents sixty-five essays from writers and others, who talk about a very brief encounter with a total stranger. They never found out their name in most cases, and as well, they never made contact with them again. But the fact remained, they left an indelible imprint within their psyche, like a song in
3.5 starsHave you ever met a stranger that somehow had an unexpected impact on your life? Even a momentary connection with a person can reveal parts of yourself that you were unaware of or that can help you appreciate aspects of your life you didn’t previously take note of. These unforeseen interactions can be meaningful, magical, or even mundane – but they can indeed leave an indelible mark.Colleen Kinder decided to offer this assignment to her fellow writers: write a letter to a stranger who h...
I picked this one up because one of my favorite authors, Pam Houston, had contributed and I wanted to read her Letter to a Stranger. Houston's essay pulled me in and I never looked back. This collection speaks to me on many different levels but probably the most intriguing part of it is the fact that, as pointed out in the forward and introduction, most of us could write a letter to someone that we never really knew but who had a lasting impact on our lives just as the writers in this book have
“We spend our lives turning them into beloveds and ghosts: the ones we need, the ones we ache for, the ones we lose, the ones we brush up against and never really know, who stay with us anyway.”Self-proclaimed friend of the editor and stranger-letter-writer herself, Leslie Jamison writes a moving forward that touches perfectly on the sheer breadth of interactions and emotions covered within this collection of sixty-five pieces all from different writers spread throughout the world. I think that
