"guide to the health of contemporary fiction"

The Book of Other People, a collection of short stories featuring the work of David Mitchell, George Saunders, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Miranda July and many more is reviewed in The Independent. Profits from the book will go to 826 NYC.

So what can we conclude after The Book of Other People? That Chekhov's influence on the short story is still paramount. That "hysterical realism", the tendency in contemporary fiction so accurately diagnosed by critic James Wood in 2001 – symptoms include fact fetishism, list making, digressive mini-essays – has mercifully given way to something more intelligent and true.