Stories for a Phone Book was published in New Writing 13; you can buy it off Amazon.com.

I do seem to remember someone posting a PDF or JPG copy on the old forum; anyone still have that?

Found on Google Book Search, Chris Plougheld's Inside Stories, an anthology of short stories of recent British writers, with exercises for the (Norwegian?) upper secondary school.

Steven's "Stories for a Phone Book" appears on pg.96 and 97; on pg.95 are the following questions:

Understanding
1. What is your immediate reaction to finding pages from a phone book in an anthology of prose fiction?
2. Phone books are about communication and identification: to make sure that you will reach the right person, the phone book gives you just enough information to identify the persons listed, usually by giving the address and, sometimes, title. What kind of information does this 'phone book' give?
3. Are there links between some of the listings?

Interpretation
1. In this text there is a clash between the publicly available information that we expect to find in a phone book and the private or intimate information that we actually get. How do you respond to the fact that this 'phone book' makes this kind of information public?
2. What does the text (and your response to it) tell us about our public and private lives and the relationship between them?
3. Can each entry be seen as (a fragment of) a micro story about this person? What kind of personality does the information give you a hint of? How do you fill in the gaps?
4. What is the effect of this blurring of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction?

And here's a video interview with Plougheld; can anyone translate?

Wow, I just finished reading the pages. I loved that...I didn't think I would when I first started, but I really did love it. Sometimes, I have to wonder, it sounds a bit like the story for each person is being written by the person below them. It's probably not intended that way, but I do have to admit that even with such a small "story"...I find myself thinking of entire situations as I read each line.

---

And there it was, full of everything and overwhelming nothingness.
Leo went on, a false idea resting in a candy wrapper of societal perfection.

He had no idea what it meant to see, what it meant to know.

And there was no way for me to un-know. No way for me to un-see. No way I could ever shield myself in one of those brightly colored candy wrappers of pretend ignorance.

I think I wanted it that way, to be like Leo, but I knew that would never happen.

~A snippet of things to come.