num_pages: 203
description: Communicationor the lack thereofis the subject of this sly update of the picaresque novel. No One Writes Back is the story of a young man who leaves home with only his blind dog an MP3 player and a book traveling aimlessly for three years from motel to motel meeting people on the road. Rather than learn the names of his fellow travelersor even invent nicknames for themhe assigns them numbers. There's 239 who once dreamed of being a poet but who now only reads her poems to a friend in a coma; there's 109 who rides trains endlessly because of a broken heart; and 32 who's already decided to commit suicide. The narrator writes letters to these men and women in the hope that he can console them in their various miseries as well as keep a record of his own experiences: A letter is like a journal entry for me except that it gets sent to other people. No one writes back of course but that doesn't mean that there isn't some hope that one of them will someday...
language: English
title: No One Writes Back
publisher: Dalkey Archive Press