'Writing for the New Millennium: The Birth of Electronic Literature" by Robert Kendall, in Poets & Writers Magazine (Nov.-Dec. 1995),72 Spring St., New York, N.Y. 10012.

Someone reading Stuart Moulthrop's encounters a man named Harley and a wait- novel Victory Garden (1991) on a computer ress named Veronica flirting in a bar. If the reader hits the "Enter" key, the story continues with Harley and a friend resuming their conversation as Veronica leaves. But if the reader instead selects certain words highlighted in the text--for instance, "another table"--the story takes a different path, fol- lowing Veronica as she goes to wait on another customer. Or if the reader chooses "Veronica," the narrative leads to a bedroom scene between Veronica and Harley.

Victory Garden is a "hypertext novel," part of a growing new genre called "interactive literature." Kendall, who teaches interactive poetry and fiction at the New School for Social Research in New York, says that more and more writers, including some established ones such as Thomas M. Disch and Robert Pinsky, have been trying their hands at interactivity.

"The new electronic literature breaks the bonds of linearity and stasis imposed by paper," Kendall contends. "In digital form a story can draw readers into its world by giving them a role in shaping it, letting them choose which narrative thread to follow, which new situation or character to explore. Within a 'page of poetry on screen, words of lines can change continually as the reader watches, making the text resonate with shift- ing shades of meaning. Written work can 'improvise,' altering its own content every time it's read. With its power to mix text, graphics, sound, and video, the PC can extend the ancient interdisciplinary traditions of writing."

Electronic publishing is currently a booming field, Kendall notes, with hundreds of novels, stories, and poems available on CD-ROM. The vast majority of these works originally appeared in print, but interactive literature is growing. Many locations on the Internet's World Wide Web, he says, now contain hypertext fiction and poetry.

The writer "who really opened up the electronic frontier to serious writing," Kendall says, was Michael Joyce. His hyper- text novel, Afternoon, a Story (1990), "requires the reader to unravel interwoven strands of narrative to make sense of the story. The reader's efforts parallel the strug- gle of the story's main character to learn whether his son and estranged wife have been killed in a car accident." The Washington Post Book World called Joyce's work "a noteworthy piece of recent American fiction, genre considerations aside."

Electronic literature has not yet been widely accepted by the reading public, Kendall concedes. But that may change, he believes, when "an inexpensive paperback-sized computer with a screen that matches the readability of the printed page" arrives on the scene. "Then," he predicts, "the electronic publishing boom will begin in earnest."