Starting today, The Slate (a web site devoted to news, the arts, politics, health, sports, food, and pretty much anything they feel like writing about at any given moment) will be host to a new, exciting venture in novel writing. Walter Kirn, author of the 1999 smash hit Thumbsucker, is going to be writing a new novel called The Unbinding, and it will be written exclusively for the web and take place in real time.

According to the article on Slate, The Unbinding is "a dark comedy set in the near future, [it] is a compilation of "found documents"--online diary entries, e-mails, surveillance reports, etc. It will make use of the Internet's unique capacity to respond to events as they happen, linking to documents and other Web sites. In other words, The Unbinding is conceived for the Web, rather than adapted to it."

Sounds like quite an interctive story! As of 10:58 this morning, the beginning of the novel has yet to be posted. Actually, scratch that, they just posted it! To read the first installment of The Unbinding, click here.

The novel will be updated roughly two times a week from now through the month of June.

Happy reading!