I have lots of book news to share. The quick news is that Kotaku’s running an excerpt from Expressive Processing and MIT Press has now published a paperback of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media — taking the price down to around $15 at online booksellers.
The bigger news is two new edited collections that have just been published. The most recent is Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres — which is already available in Europe and should hit the US any time now. It focuses on “literary processes in interactive installations, locative narratives and immersive environments, in which active engagement and bodily interaction is required from the reader to perceive the literary text.” Editors Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla have put together a star-studded list of contributors including N. Katherine Hayles, John Cayley, Rita Raley, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Joseph Tabbi, Katja Kwastek, Fotis Jannidis, and so on. The introduction is online. My contribution is called “Beyond the Complex Surface” and looks at the connection between innovation at the interface/surface level and structures at the computational level.
Almost as recent — also published this year in Europe, but already available in the U.S. — is Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. A Handbook. Here the lead editor is Roberto Simanowski (joined by Schäfer and Gendolla) and the structure is quite interesting. Each contributor offers two chapters, one about their their scholarly approach to digital literature and one about their teaching approach to the topic. Again, I’m glad to be among some great contributors from around the world (e.g., Raine Koskimaa, John Zuern, Karin Wenz) and the introduction is online. My chapters break down the different elements of digital literature that I think we need to examine — and some reasons — and connect digital literature to discussions of procedural literacy.
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