Rachel Deahl reports for Publishers Weekly that Slate is launching its new fiction section with a serialized novel by Walter Kirn titled The Unbinding:

Kirn’s novel is intended to make inventive use of its format while ruminating on how the Internet shapes our culture. As such, the unfolding story is being presented as a series of found documents with links to Web sites, e-mails and other digital mediums.

I’m interested to see how this experiment plays out, as I’ve long been a fan of found texts in literature. I think Borges does this better than anyone, but there’s also Richard Flanagan’s highly inventive Gould’s Book of Fish, published in 2002, and the Swedish “found text” masterpiece, Lars Gustafsson’s The Death of a Beekeeper. I had my grad students in the craft of the novel course read Beekeeper this semester, and followed it up with this exercise: create a list of three found texts that might form the basis of a novel. The students came up with some really interesting work, some of which will hopefully make it into their novels-in-progress or future manuscripts.