HTLit

What We’re Reading

Terrific new media, new and old, that we’re particularly enjoying.

• Black Box

  Spectacular Twitter fiction from Jennifer Egan, impinging on the world of her novel,A Visit From The Goon Squad.

• Patanoir

  Simon Christiansen’s brilliantly clever interactive fiction.

• Out Of Touch

  Christine Wilks’s Out of Touch is an exploration into loneliness and the fetish (and artifice) of human connectedness inherent in social media, a theme to which many of us can relate.

• Meanwhile

  Andrew Plotkin’s iOS implementation of Jason Smiga’s interactive comic.

• Machine #69

  by Mark Wernham. Machine #69 recalls Ryman’s 253, and especially Bob Arellano’s Sunshine ’69 both in its embrace of arbitrary connection and its fond nostalgia for the era when cheap booze, good drugs, fast cars and hot guns seemed to offer everything worth wanting and when nothing was worth wanting very much.

• afternoon, a story

  by Michael Joyce. The first great hypertext fiction, a landmark that repays close study.

• Luminous Airplanes

  A new hyperromance for the Web. Sparsely linked, La Farge’s new hypertext nods at Stephanie Strickland’s design and to Michael Joyce’s direct address to the reader. but brings a new voice and sensibility to Web fiction.

• Changed

  Multimedia notes from underground, where a traumatized girl furnishes a cozy space in an underground tunnel. Script by Lynda Williams, music and code by Andy Campbell and Matthew Wright. A web work that’s especially nice on the iPad. (The floor lamp is a nice allusion. Get it?)