“Going Postal: Letter-Narratives” looks at creative fictional works that play with the letter’s built-in paradoxes of absence and presence, private and public. We’ll orient ourselves to stories told in letters and stories told about letters, mostly from the 18th century when postal networks and the print marketplace were expanding (Austen, Laclos, Montagu, Pope, Richardson), along with a couple of 20th-c. texts (Davis, Pynchon) that update the genre’s central concerns. Along the way we’ll consider recent critical work on epistolarity and postality. (EMS; lit-in-translation)