Lust
"A compact and sensual tale, Mary-Kim Arnold's 'Lust' is always on the verge of exploding." -- Kathryn Cramer, author of "In Small & Large Pieces"
"A miniature gem"-- New York Times Book Review
"Uniquely a hypertext, 'Lust' conjures the thing itself and its seductive terrors by presenting fragments of its consequences. It conjures a feast from the leftovers." -- David G. Hartwell
"Fugal, multiple, confusing (even for some readers, my
students especially, maddening), haunting, irreproducible"--
Michael Joyce, Modern Fiction Studies
I Have Said Nothing
"Superb, crystalling, finely balanced between savagery
and sympathy." -- Stuart Moulthrop
"I Have Said Nothing" uses the resources of Storyspace in ways which demonstrate the coherence and aesthetic satisfaction possible in a hypertext fiction."
-- Judith Kerman, author of Mothering
Poised between prose and poetry, this acclaimed hypertext draws the reader into artfully recombined scenes of terror and seduction.
Mary-Kim Arnold's "Lust" is a short fiction that experiments with the possibilities of hypertextual combinations of a small number of nodes -- it has 38 nodes and 141 links. The reader encounters violent scenes, a sequence of lovers, the creation and loss of family, blood, and screaming. These sequences -- and their meanings -- differ with the reader's initial choices.
Of the writing of "Lust," Mary-Kim Arnold writes:
"This experience has been a tremendous one for me, personally, academically, psychologically, maybe even sexually. In any event, this medium has been the most fertile, flexible, giving, nurturing place I have ever found to write in, to be in, to share in."This bold work uses the limits of this new form to its advantage; it has been one of the most influential hypertexts yet written.
Bracketed by two fatal car accidents, "I Have Said Nothing" is a meditation on the enormity that divides us from others. Douglas explores the interaction between the fragmentation inevitable in hypertext and the causality necessary for the creation of story; she says, "I had a vague ... conviction that causality is the root of all narratives: like E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, I believed that you could rip everything else to shreds as long as you kept something that resembled cause and effect pumping away beneath the surface, you could keep just about any amorphous blob going." The result is a tough, hard-edged, look at how we fragment ourselves to avoid pain, to avoid the inevitable -- death.
The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext
volume 1 number 2
ISBN 1-884511-12-0
Macintosh and Windows..... $24.95
About the authors:
Mary-Kim Arnold
J. Yellowlees Douglas
Don't miss:
Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop.
In Small & Large Pieces by Kathryn Cramer.
Completing the Circle by Michael van Mantgem.
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