Christian Crumlish

Disclaimer: A piece by me is included in this book, so I'll refrain from rating the book but will offer some background on it.

This book was compiled from creative materials published on the World Wide Web circa 1994-1997. Levi Asher and Christian Crumlish wanted to capture a snapshot of the creativity popping up online back before the first big Internet Bubble had even started to bulge,in an era when the web was just beginning to get commercialized and the those doing creative works online formed an informal social network. My impression was that this book wanted to capture a broad selection of works from people who had been doing innovative creative writing, drawing on poetry, fiction and auto-biographical works, and to put that into a coffee table book that recognized the web as an emerging new form of literature. Of course some of the works were highly graphical in nature, or which used a narrative based on hyper-text and so they probably translate a bit differently to paper. And a decade later this probably seems a bit dated, especially if you didn't experience the web back when AOL embraced the Internet and back before Windows 98 was even released.

The editors have continued on make impacts in various web contexts since then. Levi Asher's LitKicks.com site now a well respected site for writers exploring creative writing and poetry, and for appreciation of literature in general. Crumlish authored many early Internet and software how-to books and edited many other books and has been an active blogger for years.… (mais)