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1. Blue Company

   A novel told in email. Readers subscribed and received at least one e-mail per day for the month of May 2002. Blue Company is part one of a two part fiction; the second part is "Kind of Blue" by Scott Rettberg. Blue Company's e-mails are from a young marketing guy, Berto, who has gotten a really bad job transfer. He's been transferred to Italy, which is great, but he's also been transferred to the 14th century, which is dangerous and uncomfortable. The e-mails are nominally addressed to a woman Berto met shortly before his departure, and as he courts her we learn the story of his travels with a small group of 21st century corporate mercenaries called the "Blue Company" toward a fateful rendezvous beyond Milan. The e-mails are illustrated by hand since, of course, there were no cameras in the late middle ages.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.01.2011 - 12:50

2. The Unknown

   The Unknown is a collaborative hypertext novel written during the turn of the millennium and principally concerning a book tour that takes on the excesses of a rock tour. Notorious for breaking the "comedy barrier" in electronic literature, The Unknown replaces the pretentious modernism and self-conciousness of previous hypertext works with a pretentious postmodernism and self-absorption that is more satirical in nature. It is an encyclopedic work and a unique record of a particular period in American history, the moment of irrational exuberance that preceded the dawn of the age of terror. With respect to design, The Unknown privileges old-fashioned writing more than fancy graphics, interface doodads, or sophisticated programming of any kind. By including several "lines" of content from a sickeningly decadent hypertext novel, documentary material, metafictional bullshit, correspondence, art projects, documentation of live readings, and a press kit, The Unknown attempts to destroy the contemporary literary culture by making institutions such as publishing houses, publicists, book reviews, and literary critics completely obsolete.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.02.2011 - 19:39

3. The Doll Games

   The Doll Games is a hypertext project that documents a complex narrative game that Shelley and Pamela Jackson used to play when they were prepubescent girls, and frames that documentation in faux-academic discourse. In “sitting uneasily between” different styles of discourse, the work enlists the reader to differentiate between authoritative knowledge and play. Although the dolls in question are “things of childhood,” the project reveals that in the games the authors used to play with these dolls, one can find the roots of both Pamela and Shelley’s “grownup” lives: Shelley’s vocation as a fiction writer, and Pamela’s as a Berkeley-trained Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Throughout, the project plays with constructions of gender and of identity. This is a “true” story that places truth of all kinds in between those ironic question marks. The Doll Games is a network novel in the sense that it uses the network to construct narratives in a particularly novel way. The Doll Games is also consciously structured as a network document, and plays in an ironic fashion with its network context.

   Scott Rettberg - 26.02.2011 - 16:24