9/11

Scott Rettberg appreciates Weinberg's small pieces more than his 'unified theory,' while viewing the Internet not as an economic panacea but a communication medium woven into the fabric of contemporary culture.

Marc Bousquet introduces a forthcoming Altx critical e-book, hosted online by ebr, appearing in five sections through the Fall of 2003. A new ebr thread, Technocapitalism, is built around its concerns.

The story of an activist website's shutdown, as told by DeeDee Halleck, with interstitial e-mails.

On Joseph McElroy's Fiction as a lifelong, dramatic investigation of noesis - that abstract but
evocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined(through Phenomenology) as
those ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.

A Review of Malise Ruthven's A Fury for God: The Islamist
Attack on America, from Tim Keane, with links to a growing body of writing on terror in ebr.

Michael Boyden reflects on the stubborn and idiosyncratic fiction of Harry Mathews and introduces a new ebr gathering of work on and by Mathews.

As Christian Moraru argues here that the new is still the objective in contemporary writing. But writers and artists make it by making it anew rather than new ("Get it used," Andrei Codrescu invites us), a new not so much novel as renovated, reframed and reproduced rather than produced, which by the same token redefines and advertises authorship as deliberate plagiarism.

Can the rising cost of cosmopolitan real estate have brought the New York City novel to a low point? Tom LeClair measures recent fictions from and about New York City - including three "9/11 novels" - against the Systems Novel of the mid-1970s.

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of "under-language" to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, while simultaneously using the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.