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
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–Michael Kinsley
