Zadie Smith might be best known as the audaciously skilled young author of "White Teeth" and "On Beauty," but she claims that her gifts lie elsewhere. "I think I'm a pretty talented writer," she once told poet Robert Hass, "but I'm a great reader."
Judging by "The Book of Other People," an anthology of stories she edited to benefit 826, Dave Eggers' nonprofit writing labs for kids, Smith might be on to something.
Who else would put graphic novelist Chris Ware and Irish novelist Colm Tóibín between the same covers of a short-story anthology? Smith's instructions to them were simple: "Make somebody up." That permission seems to have rubbed off on the work. "The Book of Other People" is full of writers taking chances.
Some of the characters we meet here talk their way into existence, like Rhoda, the chatterbox grandmother in Jonathan Safran Foer's story. "Have a cookie," her monologue starts off, and doesn't end until she's commented on hair, bathroom habits, the listener's wife and the health benefits of cookies.
Other characters reveal themselves through what they don't say. In Aleksandar Hemon's "The Liar," a prisoner about to be punished during the Roman Empire turns out to have a surprising identity. Zadie Smith writes of a man so obsessed by his own father that he doesn't realize he has begun to bequeath a similar anxiety of regret and resentment to his children.
There are only so many ways to tell a tale, many of them descended from Don Quixote. But a few are new, such as Ware's hilarious and astonishing "Jordan Wellington Lint," which cleverly represents a young boy's early stages of development.
In one frame, the toddler sits in a sandbox outside a house. Everything in the panel is labeled, just as a young child learns to classify the world.
Not all the experiments pay off. David Mitchell's opening story, which jumps from point of view to point of view, is confusing and jarring. Nick Hornby's "J. Johnson" is somewhat arch and reliant on an inside-publishing joke.
