Electronic Literature Organization

Photopia is described in Baf’s Guide as “Sweet and sad, and complex enough that you may need to go through it twice in order to fully understand how all the fragments fit together.” It is one of the most widely admired pieces by genre-bending interactive fiction author Cadre. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.

afternoon, a story is one of the most widely-discussed works of electronic literature. It is the story of Peter, a technical writer who (in one reading) begins his afternoon with a terrible suspicion that the wrecked car he saw hours earlier might have belonged to his former wife: “I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.” See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.

In its print edition, “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” won Boston Review’s Second Annual Poetry Contest; the online edition won About.com’s Best of the Net Poetry Award. The ballad relates the tensions between and impulses of the carbon-based and the silicon-based. The hypertext edition is illustrated and allows the reader access to any part of the poem at any point. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece and its author.

Judy Malloy’s “Interlude” is part of a longer work entitled Dorothy and Sid. This story focuses on the lives of contemporary artists in the San Francisco Bay area; it unfolds in four parts: “Dorothy Abrona McCrae”; “Interlude — Dorothy and Sid”; “A Party at Silver Beach”; and “Afterwards.” Each of these narratives is characterized by multilinear story segments that can be accessed by the reader in varying order. “Dorothy Abrona McCrae” was begun as an online serial in April 2000. A new installment was added each month. The final installment was posted in December 2000. In “Interlude — Dorothy and Sid,” in a series of trips and intimate moments, Dorothy and Sid change their long-term but occasional relationship into a more serious commitment.

Bobby Rabyd, a.k.a. Robert Arellano, details the “Summer of Hate” by relating intermixed stories of death in the San Franciso Bay area in 1969. Sunshine ‘69 was the first Web novel. On its release, Robert Coover said, “no one has grasped the nature of this new thing called the ‘Net with more supple-minded alacrity than the writer Bobby Rabyd.” See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.