Bookworm: Underground Stories

EVEN if he'd never written a word himself, even if he'd never founded McSweeney's literary magazine, or set up his own major literacy scheme, novelist David Eggers would still be a remarkable innovator.

In 2004 he set up a charity called Voice of Witness, for which volunteers interview people who have suffered injustice. These interviews are then collected and edited into books. It was through the work done on Voices from the Storm, the book they did about Hurricane Katrina, for example, that Eggers first heard about the case of Syrian-American Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the Good Samaritan arrested as a terror suspect who is the subject of Eggers's latest book of non-fiction.

Voice of Witness's latest book, Underground America, published later this month (Atlantic Books, 14.99) is a collection of interviews with illegal US immigrants that has the range and importance of the great Studs Terkel's oral histories. Their value is twofold: first, because once you put a human face on a social problem it becomes harder to ignore (in a British context, think of how Jeremy Sandford's 1966 drama-documentary Cathy Come Home highlighted the problem of homelessness), and secondly because their very range defies stereotyping.

Hide Ad

That's certainly the case with the illegal immigrants interviewed in Underground America. One of them, for example, is an Iranian businessman who employs a number of US citizens yet is terrified of deportation back to his own country. Another is a worker who helped rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, yet was imprisoned for not having the right documents. A third was enticed into the US to work as a missionary, only to find herself forced into unpaid work.

These books – and there are ones in the pipeline about Zimbabwe and Burma – go deeper into societies than much investigative journalism and nearly all foreign reportage can do. There's nothing like them in Britain, where publishing's only interest in ordinary people telling their stories is related to the Second World War.

Talking of which, watch out for Listening to Britain (The Bodley Head, 18.99), an absolutely fascinating collection of Home Intelligence Reports from 1940 drawing on a wide range of sources, from Mass Observation to individual informants, assessing the morale of the country, region by region, week by week. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in Britain's Finest Hour – and a reminder that, even if we don't care now about the reportage of ordinary lives, we certainly used to.

OUT OF THE ETHER

MONDAY sees the launch of a new electronic publisher selling exclusive short stories and essays. Sir Paul McCartney (writing on vegetarianism), Hilary Mantel, Alexander McCall Smith, Lionel Shriver and many more have signed up to Ether Books, who pay writers according to the number of people who download its iPhone apps, which cost anything from 59p to 2.39 a time. Is this the future of the short story? We shall soon find out.

Related topics: