Our Revels Now Are Ended
Our
Revels Now Are Ended
This week brings the end of
our experimental novel-by-e-mail, Reply All. For the
past year, three authors in three cities--Washington, New York, and Los
Angeles--have been e-mailing one another in the personae of three characters in
their respective locations. Little did they know when they began--the
characters or the authors--that they'd get tangled up with Monica, Ken, Linda,
Lucianne, and the equally colorful goings-on of our real-life melodrama. If
only the writers could bring that one to a conclusion as well.
The entire 44 chapter
Reply All saga can be downloaded as a Microsoft Word or
an Adobe
Acrobat document. It's about 60 pages.
And now that it's over, we
can reveal the identities of the authors: in Los Angeles, the screenwriter Erik
Tarloff, whose novel about Washington, Face-Time , will be published in
January by Crown; in New York, the novelist Francine Prose; and, in Washington
... well, he or she would lose his or her job, so we'd still better not
say.
Our
thanks to all six of them--authors, characters--for an entertaining year.
And
Speaking of E-Mail
If you
like your morning delivery of "Today's Papers," or even if you haven't yet
tried getting your fix of
Slate
this way, sign up for our new
afternoon and evening deliveries, featuring
Slate
's analysis of
breaking news and
Slate
's cultural coverage (respectively). Click
here to go to
the e-mail sign-up page. It's all free as sunshine to
Slate
subscribers.
--Michael Kinsley
