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I actually don't know this work so thank you for passing it along! But my novel is very far from being perfect and in fact that is precisely what told me that I was no longer writing in the novel form. I characterized it to my business partner as a 'tesseractic text', in that it was a 3D shadow of a 4D object but only incompletely read in our usual 3D space. 'St. Kirsten' is thus an analogue shadow narrative of a digital interactive immersion experience. I'm going to try to get it out next year sometime.

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I do like a tesseract! If you have a chance to read Stoner, let me know what you think about it. Of course, if you're like me there's a stack of reading to get through and yet another suggestion will find itself somewhere in the pile ... if it's lucky.

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This was very handy Bryan as my most recent novel is very much in this pedigree. So much so, I rather ostentatiously entitled it 'the last novel', as in, this is the end of the novel as narrative form, finally.

I think my transition to writing for digital in my recent role as CEO of a gaming software start-up prompted this post-novel book, but I have no doubt if interactive media had been around in the 1920s onward, authors such as Cortazar and Camus would have leapt on its hydrogen powered bus. - Greg

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Sounds very interesting - I like the idea of the post-post-post-modern novel! Or some such designation. The 'last' novel for me was John Williams's Stoner. A re-release (originally from 1965), it's ... well, perfect. And fiction paled from that point. In fact, not long after I read it I was in a local Waterstones branch and the guy was putting several of this book on the shelf behind the till. I mentioned it had ruined fiction for me - and he agreed. Seriously, no piece of writing has ever affected me the way this one did.

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Cortázar was a prodigious drinker of maté. After reading Hopscotch in my mid-twenties, I became one too: it's a lovely drug. See also Antonioni's important midsixties flick Blowup, inspired by the story Las Babas del Diablo (Blow Up in the English trans); won the Palme d'Or year it came out.

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I remember you waxing rhapsodically about maté - haven't really thought about that in a while. Perhaps I need to look into that instead of coffee and tea. Blowup is great - it was on one of the channels a couple of years ago and I enjoyed seeing again years after the last time. In the footnotes of the Cortazar Bus Stop I put a link to a Roger Ebert review - very positive reassessment of what many critics panned when it was originally released. The story's good, too - lovely sense of unease building throughout.

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I really enjoyed the playlist, Brian! Thanks for sharing good content and good music.

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Very glad you liked it, João! Thanks!

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