New Friends

a.k.a. Kenneth Millar

Like Karl-Erik Lindkvist, the Swedish reader of crime fiction who created The Ross Macdonald Files, we've read every one of Macdonald's superb noir novels many times. Our ancient paperbacks endure broken spines and scarred faces, but they still deliver the goods. So does this site. In addition to the annotated book list one might expect -- and articles about the author gathered from here and there -- Lindkvist offers a bountiful harvest of quirky asides and an enlightening table laid with pertinent details of the fictional life and addictive M.O. of Macdonald's detective, Lew Archer. Like the Ivy Compton-Burnett site (below) and many another single-author site on the web, this one glows with one reader's admiration.

For The Love Of Ivy

Another site devoted to single authors is The Ivy Compton-Burnett Home Page, a labor of love mounted by devotees of the late English novelist. We add the site not because we share the site publishers' devotion (although we certainly have nothing against the author), but because the site is done so well and in such depth. Fans will enjoy the wallow and newcomers to Compton-Burnett's work will come away not only with a clear understanding of why she inspires admiration, but armed with all the resources they'll need to pursue a newfound interest.

The Road to Dot City

Even if the massive linkfest American Authors On The Web had done nothing more than lead us to Dot City: Dorothy Parker's New York, a terrific addition to our list of single-author sites, we'd be happy to have discovered it. But this Japan-based site offers much more: if you're looking for a world of perspective on poets from Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman or novelists as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton, you're likely to find it here.

Art, Yes, But Is It Smut? UPDATE

The novelist, journalist and critic Jules Siegel has added another string to his bow: he's now a web publisher, too. At his Book Arts site, curious readers can find out all about the artist, his work and his family; read various interesting bits and pieces on line, and even order his handmade ink-on-paper books. Siegel, whose Forbidden Dreams: Fragments Of A Novel In Progress appears (all 14,000 erotically charged words) in our 1999 Summer Reading issue, first appeared in TW3 with an essay titled Pit Bull Journalism.

Old Friends

Tom & Zora & Harry & Bill & Ed & ...

Why have so many truly astonishing writers emerged from the American South? There's no shortage of theories in circulation, so, if you're hooked on that sort of thing, why not just pick one that agrees with your temperament and your provenance and adopt it as your own? For our part, we'll just read them -- and about them -- and have a good time doing it. Harry Crews, a modern but deeply rooted son of the Deep South, makes a good starting place, as does Cormac McCarthy. Both are formidable presences. But since we at Virtual Ink, like Billy Pilgrim, are feeling a bit unstuck in time as we simultaneously approach and retreat from the millennium, let us steer you backward toward these enduring stars of the Southern firmament: Zora Neale Hurston (author of the remarkable Their Eyes Were Watching God), and Mark Twain all have homes in cyberspace, as well as in the pantheon, these days. Why not drop in for a spot of tea or a sip of moonshine? (Link Watch: William Faulkner, pictured here, seems suddenly to have become homeless on the web, as has Thomas Wolfe. The sites we originally listed are no longer on line and their links have been removed. The same, unfortunately, goes for "What The Thunder Said," a handsome site devoted to the life and work of T.S. Eliot.)

Then there's Edward Abbey, the late philosopher and celebrator of the American Southwest, whose cybermonument resides on a computer in Stockholm and is kept by a Swedish programmer. Christer Lindh spent some time on foot in the deserts of the Southwest a few years back, while coding for an American company, and that's where he discovered a writer worth all the attention he's lavished on Abbey ever since. Abbey's Web is, as some of us say in the border country, muy sabroso. Included there are bits and pieces collected from resources online and otherwise and from Abbey's admirers all over the world, neatly arranged in an accessible and appealing mosaic by Christer. You'll find bibliographical and biographical info, photos, woodcuts by Michael McCurdy, excerpts, articles critical and popular, and much more. If it weren't for the web, any Abbey fan worth the salt encrusting his or her hatband would be obliged to book the first flight to Stockholm this very night.

   >> Also: TW3 Guest Shot: Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang

The Thomas Pynchon Page turns out to be the front door to the Hyperarts Pynchon Pages. Select More Pynchonalia from the menu and you'll open a very nice can of worms. For starters, there's that slippery Nosferatuish apparition (he may even have bounced down to the next entry). The link leads, too, to San Narciso, which we discover is, in fact, Claremont, California, near LA. (Things are not what they seem.) Pynchon worshippers live here. They'll tour you around their take on the landscape of Gravity's Rainbow (don't miss the site linked under the disingenuous heading "Tim Ware's Concordance") and steer you to their Roadsigns section, where you may glance at a bibliography and, if you want more, move on....

You'll get more, and plenty of it, at Spermatikos Logos, "the corner of the Libyrinth dedicated to Thomas R. Pynchon." This is it, folks, the real thing, content-rich and with a full head of wavy snakes for hair. We love it. If you do, too, burrow in. You'll discover things, among them that Pynchon shares the Libyrinth with James Joyce and Franz Kafka, among others. How appropriate. There also are lots of links to other sites of interest to those whose turn of mind finds Pynchon irresistible.

"I was born a woman with an IQ more than 50. Of course I'm a feminist," observes cyberpublisher Irene Stuber in a recent Mother Jones Hellraiser Central profile. A giant among her predecessors as both a writer and a political activist is the late anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman. Given Goldman's stature, it hardly seems excessive that a 69-reel microfilm collection devoted to her life and works was published in 1991. Now we have the Emma Goldman Papers, a website based on Emma Goldman: A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources (Chadwyck-Healey 1995), to lead us through that monumental microfilm collection, which is available at a number of terraspace libraries across the United States and internationally. Site visitors can access indices of the contents of the microfilm edition and search letters arranged by correspondent, Goldman's writings by genre and date, and government documents by name, title and subject. The site also offers excerpts from the book and the traveling exhibition on Goldman, the complete exhibition narrative, and selected documents and photographs; Goldman is pictured above, for example, in an 1893 police mug shot taken after she was arrested on a charge of incitement to riot at a demonstration in New York.