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EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE Book reviews: Jonathan safran foer Tree of Codes Paul lafarge Luminous Airplanes

Exclusive: Interview with Steve Tomasula

Table of Content Book Art Scorch Atlas....................

4 Tree of Codes...................

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featherproof books is an indie publisher dedicated to doing whatever we want. This might take the form of publishing an idiosyncratic novel, design book, or something in between. We love paper, but we’re not afraid of computers. Our free downloadable mini-books are an invitation to all ten fingers to take part in the book-making process. Same with Storigami. No matter the medium, we see our authors as creative partners involved in every step of publication. We make our own fun.

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Electronic Literature Toc, a Media Novel..........

10 Luminous Airplanes..........

12 Interview Interview with Steve Tomasula....

15 Events Best Literary and Critical Works..

17 Literature Prize..................

18 EDITO: Experimental Literature is a magazine that talks about the underdogs of Literature. The works that are presented in this publication are works which you are not likely to run across at your local bookshop.

All of them are unusual, whether it be by their shape, by the way they are meant to be read or by the story they tell. We try to pick works of importance in their own fields. Our reviews are divided into sections, one for paper books which are turned into art objects by graphic designers, and one for electronic works.

We hope you enjoy our selections.

Experimental Literature #5 May 2014

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Blake Butler

I Blake Butler - Author of 3 novels and two books of short stories - Editor of HTML Giant and Lamination Colony - Co-editor of No Colony

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n Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, the world is being obliterated by a series of thirteen plagues that make those of biblical renown seem altogether quaint. But this isn’t about how nations or social structures or science deals with upheaval and disaster. No, that would be far too rational a take on a universe that seems given over entirely to irrationality. The plagues frame the stories of this book, but are immediately backgrounded by extremely personal investigations of loss. (It’s not the same at all, but consider how Anna Kavan’s Ice all but ignores its global disaster in favor of a single obsessive search). And so, the core of each of these stories lies not in end-of-the-world adventures, but in a completely real and believable pain. Isolation, the loss of children, the disintegration of family.

Scorch Atlas’ drowned, mudcaked, pustulent endgame world is so unrelenting, it absorbs all light you have for it. It bears the same adolescent Apocalypse fantasies that all sci-fi writers do in fiction and Tea Party adherents do in real life: it creates a world where no one will help you, literal helplessness, where the poor bastards that do not succumb to disaster by drowning and architectural collapse -it takes a degree of separating oneself from the recent catastrophe in Japan, and memories of Katrina to take fiction of this sort in – are worse off to live in a world of literal and metaphoric shit.

The stories are, for the most part, voluminously and unapologetically throat-slashing, yet there’s such a poetic beauty to the language that balances out such material

Book Art

Scorch Atlas (I liken this kind of comparison to some of the horrific violence of the original Suspiria, which is centered around the candy-colored cinematography, striking some oddly corporeal balance of opposite goings-on), making many of the bleak and apocalyptic landscapes seem like there’s a chance that things could get turned around, could get better–something which you never actually see coming to fruition, but with the possibilities always indefatigably looming.

Blake Butler hails from another planet, a planet where fiction isn’t just stale, old junk. Butler and writers like him are reviving my hope for fiction. Every line in Scorched Atlas is intensely rich and fluid, it washes against your skin and leaves you dusty. He takes real risks. And despite the complexity and linguistic richness of his sentences, there is still an accessibility that is hard to find in

most “experimental” fiction and poetry, and there is an undeniable emotional core to his work, a real heart pumping dust and oil across the pages. Scorch Atlas is a meditation on suffering, the perceived mutation of just being a young person being projected onto a uni-

verse ill-equipped to manifest that kind of self-loathing.

Blake Butler has coughed what needs to be read. He is now asking you to read it. Please do.

“Overhead the sky was melting, the cracked cream color rubbing off in cogs of brine.

The fields far ahead of me in endless pudding, studded here and there with what had been: homes and houses, hair and heirlooms, habits, hallways, hauntings, hope.”

Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas Experimental Literature #5 May 2014

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Book Art

Tree of Codes Jonathan Safran Foer

J Jonathan Safran Foer - Author of 9 novels and essas - His novel Exremely loud and incredibly close was adapted for the cinema - Prix des libraires du Quebec 6

onathan Safran Foer’s alltime favourite book is Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops, retitled The Street Of Crocodiles when it was translated into English 47 years ago. «Some things you love passively,» Foer told Vanity Fair, «some you love actively. In this case, I felt the compulsion to do something with it.» How might this active love manifest itself? A foreword to a new edition of Schulz’s masterwork?

No, Foer had already done that, for the Penguin Classics reissue published in 2008 in the US (but sadly not here). So, might Foer do something to bring Schulz’s book back into print in the UK? Or might he commission a fresh translation? (Celina Wieniewska’s 1963 version still reads like a dream to me, but there have been

mutterings about its faithfulness for decades.) Might he script or bankroll a movie adaptation?

No. What Foer has done is cut Schulz’s text to ribbons and turn it into a different book credited to Jonathan Safran Foer. Snip seven letters from the title Street of Crocodiles and you get Tree of Codes – and so on, for 134 intricately scissored pages. A boutique publisher called Visual Editions, working in tandem with die-cut specialists in the Netherlands and a «hand-finisher» in Belgium, has produced a £25 artefact that, if you share Foer’s aesthetics, has «a sculptural quality» that’s «just beautiful», or which, if you’re an average reader, might make you think a wad of defenceless print has been fed through an office

“How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.”

Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes Experimental Literature #5 May 2014

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shredding machine.

Foer has wanted to «create a diecut book by erasure» for years, and considered using encyclopaedias or his own novels as raw material before settling on The Street of Crocodiles. Despite the fact that all the words in Tree of Codes – including many complete phrases and sentences – are Schulz’s, Foer insists «This book is mine.» Indeed, he argues that in a sense, every book ever written is chopped out of another one, ie the dictionary. Does such amiably arrogant, faux-naïve spin sound familiar? Foer’s detractors will seize upon this project as yet another example of his characteristic blend of whimsy and hubris – the same artifice-dazzled unawareness of being out of one’s depth that birthed his 9/11 fable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

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Nevertheless, it may prove to be a shrewd career move. Foer doesn’t need another bestseller, but he could do with a boost to his wobbly critical standing. Tree of Codes is a godsend to academics everywhere. What postgraduate who salivates at the sight of words such as «metatextuality», «intertextuality» and «hypertextuality» could fail to feel a swelling in the PhD gland? Form and content are in intimate dialogue here. This objet d’art, composed substantially of empty spaces, is a conceptual must-have. If the masses can’t relate to it, intellectuals may see all the more reason to concur with Vanity Fair’s judgment that it’s «very, very cool».

At fewer than 3,000 words, it’s a quick read – half your time will be taken up with turning the pages ever-so-gingerly and inserting

a blank sheet behind each so as not to be distracted by the layers beneath – but it’s surprisingly absorbing. I enjoyed it more than I expected to, even allowing for the fact that I love Schulz’s story-cycle.

Reading Tree of Codes without reference to the original, you may conclude that Foer has conjured beautiful new images from every page. Comparing the two texts paragraph by paragraph, you notice quite often that what seems like an audacious coinage is already there in the original; Foer has merely excised hunks of Schulz’s luxuriant verbiage and exhibited a slimmed-down version of the master’s vision.

Poetry aside, does Tree of Codes function as fiction? Sort of.

Schulz’s own book – typically Polish – is a rich stew of metaphysical mischief and meditations,

All very interesting, but I suspect that this book will be appraised more as an artefact than as a story.

And, as an artefact, the most remarkable thing about Tree of Codes is how very fragile it is.

Foer has claimed that the decision to produce it as a paperback was forced by necessity, because «if it were a hardback it would collapse

in on itself». That may be so, but the book’s lack of a tough shell makes it seem all the more vulnerable to mutilation. Just one rake of the fingers would destroy it.

Those booksellers brave enough to stock it will no doubt be chewing their lower lips in stress whenever a customer leafs through its delicate web of pages. Yet, knowing Bruno Schulz’s life story, there is poignancy in this. His oeuvre, which should have been large, was hacked down to modest size by tragic misfortune: his mur-

der by the Nazis, followed by the loss of hundreds of his paintings, drawings and manuscripts. The idea of The Street of Crocodiles surviving in disguise, chopped to within an inch of its life but still clinging to its soul, strikes me as a bittersweet irony, an oddly fitting homage. It has also given rise to the most potent work of art that Jonathan Safran Foer has yet produced

Book Art

with little plot engine other than the father’s slow decline into madness. Tree of Codes, while following the ghostly outline of this same narrative, pursues divergent agendas. The sexual dynamic is altered, for example. Schulz’s terrifying account of his papa’s unhealthy obsession with work becomes, in Foer’s reinvention, an obsession with the all-consuming female: «he would spend whole days in bed, surrounded by Mother. he became almost insane with mother. he was absorbed, lost, in an enormous shadow. his eyes darkened and suffering spread.» It’s as if Foer’s scalpeling of the text is a kind of psychoanalysis, seeking to expose the unacknowledged fixations hidden within (although which author’s fixations are being exposed is a moot point). Foer’s narrative also discards much of Schulz’s domestic, autobiographical detail and much of his pessimism, aiming for the bigger historical picture, and journeying more determinedly towards a transcendent ending.

Unsurprisingly, given Foer’s past works, there are passages evoking innocence overwhelmed by social catastrophe, hints of the Holocaust that killed Schulz before he was able to write about such things himself.

“And yet and yet - the last secret of the tree of codes is that nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Nowhere as much as there do we feel possibilities shaken by the nearness of realization. The atmosphere becomes possibilities and we shall wander and make a thousand mistakes. We shall wander along yet not be able to understand.”

Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes Experimental Literature #5 May 2014

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E-Literature

Toc, a Media Novel Steve Tomasula

T Steve Tomasula - Novelist, critic, short story and essay writer - Best Book of the Year in the eLit Awards, and the Mary Shelley Award for Excellence in Fiction for TOC 10

he only subject of fiction is time, author Stuart Dybek once noted; Steve Tomasula’s latest novel, TOC, a “new-media” novel available only on DVD, takes this idea literally, and presents it in a cutting-edge medium surprisingly easy to navigate, even for the most technologically backwards of readers.

A postmodern mythological epic, TOC was created in collaboration with several artists, and unfolds in stages, set to an eerie musical score with compositions by masters of the avant-garde. The novel turns interactive after the introduction, when the reader is asked to choose a victor in the battle between the characters “Chronos” and “Logos,” twin sons born to the main character Ephemera, and

fathered by a time machine.

TOC’s underlying theme is the hypothetical collapse of time itself; vignettes of the survivors of the “end of time” can be read sequentially or at random. The odyssey of TOC recalls the futuristic novels of Huxley and Orwell (Tomasula’s earlier three novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland, IN & OZ, and The Book of Portraiture also engage with post-apocalyptic themes). The story’s characters belong to one of two distinct tribes, the Tics and the Tocs, who inhabit, respectively, the “West” and “East” zones of the equatorial line established by time’s collapse.

Both tribes refer to themselves as “The People” and both believe the “other” is “damned.” TOC’s subtext is a darkly comedic take on the dangers of religious or political fundamentalisms that discount the “other” as merely nonexistent, or at worst, “evil.” This binary opposition yields one of the novel’s most pro-vocative lines: “If the Not People didn’t exist, they would have to be invented.”

The playtime of TOC varies between one and two hours: a marginal investment for this unique opportunity to explore the newest wave of digital literary media, and to read a hard-hitting

(and visually and aurally magnificent) rendition of one of the world’s most ancient moral lessons: the distinctions between right and wrong, fact and fiction, created and imposed by humankind, often toward bloody and ruinous ends.

TOC is worth the “read” for all

these reasons, especially for those skeptical of the limitations—and curious about the implications for literary fiction—of an interactive “eBook.” TOC is a novel that challenges the authority of the “text” in all contexts.

«To me, the medium is inseparable from the message, or at least an equally interesting part of the message» Steve Tomasula Experimental Literature #5 May 2014

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Airplanes

E-Literature

Luminous Paul Lafarge

O Paul Lafarge - Author of four novels - Creative writing professor at Columbia - Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize

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ne of the startling things about getting older is that somewhere along the line, members of your generation ascend to public life: they run for office, land jobs that aren’t modified by the word “assistant,” write novels. In this last instance, they do the rest of us a service by tracing the trajectory that a swath of people cut through history, and vice versa.

I thought about this while reading Paul La Farge’s new novel, “Luminous Airplanes,” which outlines the experiences of what I’m tempted to call the Trash 80 generation. (“Trash 80,” if you don’t get the reference, was the semi-affectionate nickname for the TRS-80, the most popular desktop computer of the late ’70s.) La Farge’s unnamed narrator was born around the same time as the personal computer, emerged into the job market

in the sunny dot-com ’90s and dropped out of graduate school to become a programmer in San Francisco. When the book opens, the Internet bubble has just burst, and the narrator — unmoored by the crash and also by the death of his grandfather — returns to upstate New York, to the fictional town of Thebes, where he spent childhood summers under his grandparents’ care. Ostensibly, he’s there to sort out his grandfather’s possessions. In reality, he’s sorting out his own past, or trying.

Upon arriving in Thebes, the narrator re-encounters his childhood neighbors, Kerem and Yesim Regenzeit. As a kid, he played computer games with Kerem; with Yesim he played a game most of us fondly recall as “doctor.” The grown-up Yesim is plainly unstable, but it doesn’t take long for the two to start playing the game’s adult version — with adult conse13

“Luminous Airplanes” is an unlikely project for La Farge, an experimental writer whose earlier

books include an extended allegory (“The Artist of the Missing”) and a work of historical fiction presented as a translation of an obscure French text (“Haussmann; Or, The Distinction”). By contrast, this new book is essentially a realist novel. True, it wears a postmodern coat — heaven forbid we should go outside without one in this climate — which manifests as a fondness for the digressive and the knowing. But it is a thin layer, one that seems as much a part of the story as an attempt to subvert it. The result feels like a kind of Realism 2.0, which makes sense: for La Farge and his generation, the patina of postmodernity has always been part of reality.

La Farge’s experimental-fiction roots do show, however, in a Web-based “immersive text” that supplements the print version of

«There was always another world waiting to make contact. There was always a wave waiting to brake. Now it had broken. And I sat there, staring at the screen, trying to figure out what was going on» Paul Lafarge, Luminous Airplanes 14

“Luminous Airplanes.” This text includes the entire contents of the book, plus additional sections on — oh, you name it: Julio Cortázar, attention deficit disorder, Cotton Mather, Murphy beds. In the reviewer materials I received, La Farge’s editor writes that the immersive text “points an exciting way forward” for literature. In fact, though, it points backward, to precisely the era in which “Luminous Airplanes” is set. Back then, the Venn diagram circles of book nerds and tech geeks had just kissed for the first time, and within a certain literary scene, hypertext fiction was all the rage.

The Web supplement hails from that era, and La Farge knows it.

Dig into it deep enough, and you’ll find him describing it as “the last hypertext on earth, lumbering out of the past to wreak havoc on civilization.”

Wreaking havoc on civilization is an overstatement, but I can’t recommend that you read “Luminous Airplanes” online. Navigating the text’s hyperlinks disrupts its narrative momentum, to the point that the whole thing feels like a kind of literary 52-card pickup — i.e., a lot more fun for the thrower than the throwee. The most generous take on this Web project is that it reads like a rough draft of a very good novel — which this is. Listen to the narrator, as a boy, encountering a computer for the first time: “ ‘Check it out,’ Kerem said. He switched the machine on, and . . . green words appeared and vanished, leaving only a prompt, >, the beginning of the beginning.”

Interview with Steve Tomasula

Interview

quences. Meanwhile, he muses on what he has abandoned, and what has abandoned him. The former include San Francisco, his job and his dissertation on the Millerites, a 19th-century apocalyptic sect.

The latter include, chiefly, his parents. He refers throughout the book to “my mothers,” plural, but it’s not what you’re thinking; he was raised by identical twins, one of whom was seduced, at 16, by a 50-year-old lawyer — “6-foot-2, eyes of blue, nonetheless a New York Jew.” Largely deprived of information about his absent father, the narrator can only invent fantasies. When these collapse, he is left with an unsavory reality — and left wondering if he must repeat, with Yesim, his father’s mistakes.

Yuriy Tarnawsky: Tell us a little about TOC and the “new-media novel.”

Steve Tomasula: At first I thought of it as sort of a ”chamber opera” — a story told to an audience of one, on a tiny stage, as if a 12-inch monitor were puppet theater—and told, through its staging, music, and sets, the way operas, or graphic novels, or other word-image hybrids are staged—except I didn’t want any of it acted out, or even illustrated, as in these other forms.

Rather, I wanted the images and the rest to work as text, the way I used them in my earlier print novels; I wanted to use all these languages we use to make stories—text, images, graphs, data, ads—as other ways to speak. For me it always starts with asking, what are the things a book can do? In this case, the book could include music, and animation, and the programming that makes it richer in texture and layers, hopefully, than it would be with words alone.

YT: Since the reader/viewer drives the process of reading TOC, the work bears some resemblance to computer games. Did you consciously pattern TOC on computer games, hoping to engage the user in the same way?

ST: Yes and no. The interactive nature of TOC came more out of “C-U See-Me,” a short story I originally wrote for print, but then adapted to the web. The story is about surveillance, so I wanted to give the reader a sense of being watched as he or she reads, and to let the reader watch or spy on others. I tried to weave the unease of watching and being watched into the story in a way that wasn’t possible in print: for example, at one point, the story asks the reader to supply his or her name, then the software of the story checks the reader’s computer to see if it was registered in that same name—that is, the story spies on the reader to see if they are stealing software or lying about their name. At another point, the story has the reader do the spying by letting them watch people at work through web cams.

Experimental Literature #5 May 2014

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YT: There is a well-known novel that encouraged the reader to select his own path before the availability of personal computers—Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela). Were you influenced by this book or other predecessors in any way?

ST: Yes, very much so—I don’t know if I was consciously trying to model TOC on those earlier novels, but they make up the backdrop in which we understand formally adventuresome literature. I’m thinking here of Hopscotch, but also of Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa; George Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, and other image-text novels like William Gass’s philosophical Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Lee Siegel’s great (and fun!) Love in a Dead Language, the first wave of hypertext novels, of course, and many, many others. . . .

YT: Much of TOC is narration accompanying still photography and animation; in this, it feels very much like a film. Were you influenced by film? Writing TOC, did you think of yourself as writing a movie script?

ST: No—maybe more like a graphic novel, or poetry that uses space as part of its poetics, as Apollinaire does. As with my

earlier image-text novels, I did consciously write using images as part of the narrative, so it’s not like the novel is written and the images added in afterwards. I’ve always used imagery as another form of “text” that can add layers to the story. Once upon a time, all books were like this: children’s books, of course, but also Victorian novels and illuminated manuscripts. That is, thinking of a novel as a construction that can be made of lots of things, not just text, is liberating, and this is even more true when sound and motion can be included. So from the start, I’m thinking of how images, music, sound effects, can be part of the narration. I guess the influence of film did come in as I began to imagine what would happen on screen as the story was read or told. And decisions about what to present as text and what to present as a voiceover to be listened to began to push it toward a hybrid of film and book. Maybe that’s the best way to think of it: as this hybrid, in that the writing was very much like writing a novel, but with stages that novels don’t usually go through. For example, I had to storyboard out what was going to happen, and when or how, and tie it all to the programming—when to scroll, when to click, etc.

YT: A number of other people contributed to TOC. Stephen Farrell provided images and design, and you use video and other art, animation, and lots of music, including some by Eric Satie. How did you manage to meld all of this into a cohesive work? Was there much of going back and forth between you and the collaborators?

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Best Literary and Critical Works

ST: Yes, there was a lot of back and forth with the artists who contributed work to TOC, most of whom never actually met each other. I think I and Chris Jara, the programmer, were the only ones who saw the entire novel before it was published. A lot of time was spent recruiting people to be voice actors, or musicians, or one of the other kinds of artists needed to pull this off, with some collaborators joining the band, so to speak, and eventually dropping out, and then others coming on board as the needs of the project dictated.

YT: When you started to work on the text, did you know that it was going to be “illustrated” so to speak? Did you already have a visual conception of the final work?

ST: For the core story, no. I wrote it like any other text-only story for print publication, though it did have a collage structure, so its form lent itself to thinking of it in frames or panels.

After I worked with Stephen to turn it into a word-image story, though, I started writing the other pieces of the novel with visuals in mind. At the time a general rule of thumb for writing for computer screens was to limit text to the words that could fit on an index card, because that was about all the text on screen that most readers could handle comfortably. So I tried to write short sections, though not necessarily sticking to cards. As with VAS and The Book of Portraiture, my other word-image novels, I tried to use visuals as part of the story, especially in terms of what parts of the narrative I was going to tell through words, and what parts of the narrative would be carried by images. I did have a conception of what this would all look like visually— you had to in order to storyboard it out—but sometimes this consisted of just brief descriptions; for example, I described a clock-tower that would incorporate lots of devices people have used to measure time—water clocks, sundials, etc. —then Maria Tomasula made the oil painting of it that Chris Jara animated.

So it went through transformations each time another artist was involved, and at each stage these collaborators brought their own ideas to it, made refinements, suggestions, gave it form.

YT: Speaking of time, “toc” of course asks for “tic” to precede it. Why are you interested in time? Novels are typically written about people, or at least about living things. What made you write a book about time, and how does time reveal itself in human beings?

ST: I don’t really write autobiographically, but at the time I began working on the story that would become the longest animation in the piece, both of my parents were dying. There was something eerie about that synchronicity—like a whole way of life being swept away the way a village at the bottom of a dam might be if the dam bursts—and that was sort of the genesis of the piece. While my father was ill, we’d talk a lot about his life, and about “his time,” as he put the era he lived through—the Depression and WWII—and you could see how “his time” shaped who he was, how he lived. He could see “his time” passing into “my time” —the time of those who didn’t live through all of that, who thought in terms of different histories or contexts—the progression gradually making him and his way of thinking an anachronism, as time will make all of us anachronistic. So I guess that ultimately I do think of the novel as being about people, though the approach is to get at things by making visible something that is as invisible to us as the air.

YT: What are your plans for the future? Will you continue working in this genre or will you go back to something more traditional?

ST: Right now I’m working on a collection of word-image short fiction, and a novel, Ascension, which traces our relationship to nature through our depictions of it—from naturalist sketchbook to folders of genetic information. Both will be image-text print books; all the maps, gene sequences, networking maps, and other visuals associated with subjects like this are just too rich not to draw on, and given the historical sweep of the story, it seems like paper has to be involved—at least for the first chapters. Maybe the last chapter, which is set today, should be an app.

May 18, 2014 in ELO

Events

Something like that was the experience that I was going for in TOC, and while to me it is still a book, and its “user” is still a reader, I guess these terms would have to be thought of more broadly: it is a “book” in that the reader experiences it one-onone, and reads it as they would any novel, but it uses graphics, video, and music to help set the mood and to help tell the story.

The ELO is proud to announce the ”The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” and “The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature.”

Below is information including guidelines for submissions for each.

“The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” “The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” is an award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this $1000 annual prize aims to recognize excellence in the field. The prize comes with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

We invite critical works of any length.

Timeline

Call for Nominations: April 15-May 10 Jury Deliberations: May 15-June 10 Award Announcement: ELO Conference Banquet

For more information, contact Dr. Dene Grigar, President, Electronic Literature Organization.

Experimental Literature #5 May 2014

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“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature” “The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature” is an award given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from supporters and members of the ELO, this $1000 annual prize aims to recognize creative excellence. The prize comes with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

We invite creative works of any length and genre. Submissions must follow these guidelines:

Timeline Call for Nominations: April 19-May 10 Jury Deliberations: May 15-June 10 Award Announcement: ELO Conference Banquet

Visual Editions is a London-based book publisher, launched in Winter 2010, co-founded by Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen.

Book Art

Literature Prize

We publish books, produce apps and events that are all, in some way, about making Great Looking Stories.

We champion books both on and off the screen that tell stories in a visual way, making for new kinds of reading experiences. We call it visual writing.

We think there is often a disparity between beautifully produced high end books that go for £100 a pop on the one hand and cheap mass market paperbacks sold in airports on the other.

And what we’re trying to do is to collapse those two extremes and make books with wonderful visual writing, beautiful production; books that are lovingly designed, designed to be read, and that those books are read by many not just by a few.

For more information, contact Dr. Dene Grigar, President, Electronic Literature Organization

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www.experimental-literature.com