Letters to a Best Friend

In 1988, when author and former surgeon Richard Selzer answered a letter from Peter Josyph, a New York artist he had met, he did not know that he was embarking on the most enduring correspondence of his life. In thousands of letters, written in longhand over the course of two decades, Selzer devoted himself to the epistolary art-an art that, even among writers, has become increasingly rare in an age of cell phones, e-mails, and text messaging. "Letters are definitely a genre," Selzer says, "and …