The Next Chapter of Reading

Regular Andy Unedited reader Jadell alerted me to this item from Jeffrey Brown. Where is the book going? Where is reading going? That’s the question Brown wants to tackle in an occasional series for PBS.

His first installment can be found here, an interview with Rick Moody and Andy Hunter. Hunter, cofounder of a new literary magazine called Electric Literature, published Moody’s story on Twitter in serial tweets, posted every ten to twenty minutes.

You can listen to the eleven-minute phone interview or read the transcript. Here’s one excerpt–a response from Moody to Brown’s question about this being a gimmick or not:

Well, it’s gimmicky at the outset, because it’s conceptual, which is to say I am trying to do what I do in this new form, and that would constitute a kind of a gimmick, but the whole thing with gimmicks is that if you don’t try to transcend them and move beyond the sort of one sentence synopsis of what’s happening, you aren’t really making literature. And I tried to work pretty hard to get beyond the gimmick and make something that was a little more lasting. I guess we’ll see in the long run if it’s [sic] stays in people’s consciousness at all, and that would be the truth of the tale. If people are still remembering it in a little while from now, then maybe it is more than a gimmick and [I] certainly hope so. I don’t know if Twitter in the end is going to be a great narrative fiction vehicle or not, but it’s certainly worth trying.

Looks to be an interesting series.