The Correspondence

"Fighting make my life," a Brazilian tells J.D. Daniels while beating him up as a way of teaching him jiu-jitsu. "You know what you feel in fight." That's pretty much the presiding sentiment in Daniels's desperate and deeply skillful little book: life is a blind, vicious battle, and you might as well get a few punches in, though surely you're going to take more than you give. In six short "letters" (to whom? to God? to his better self? to his Paris Review editor?) you learn a few things about Daniels (he's worked in factories and as a professor, and it's not clear which of the two he'll be doing in five years), but you mainly get the sense of what it's like to share a small space with him, which is not easy, but is beautiful.