Date: Saturday, 21 Nov 1998, 13:57:18 Subject: The Unknown From: Scott Rettberg To: Laura Miller, Salon Magazine CC: The Unknown Hi Laura, When’s the last time you reviewed a decent hypertext novel? Wait don’t stop reading. We’re the Unknown, a group of hypertext novelists who have written a hypertext novel, The Unknown, as a publicity stunt for an anthology of our own best writing we’re publishing called The Unknown. The hypertext novel is the story of our book tour that we haven’t gone on yet. Now I know you’ve had some bad experiences with hypertext novels in the past. Read your piece in the New York Times and, for the most part, agreed with you wholeheartedly. But this is different. This is a hypertext novel that has a story, er, several, storylines. It’s no Grammatron. It’s a satire of the contemporary American Publishing Industry. It’s a documentary. It’s an art gallery. It’s encyclopedic. Three of the four authors of the novel portion of The Unknown learned how to write encyclopedic novels from Krass-Mueller, in his fiction-writing workshop at prestigious Illinois State University. But after we had graduated with our M.A.s we discovered very quickly that none of us were geniuses. It was only after getting together, and hatching this project, that we were finally able to come up with a book that was almost as big and almost as funny as In Cold Jest. And then we put it on the World Wide Web, vastly undercutting our competition by making it free for everyone to read. So anyway, enough prattle: http://www.spinelessbooks.com/unknown/tomorrow.htm Best, Scott Rettberg