It's a literary event, a reading of a collaborative novel. Oddly, one suit-wearing author begins by reading a fictionalized account of arriving today at the reading. The story continues, recounting the authors' drug experiences with local celebrities. Then, someone from the audience yells out "hit the deck"-an underlined phrase in the text being read, up on the screen. (This novel is hypertextual, after all.) The reader clicks there, jumping to a new page. One of his collaborators stands to take his place.

The hypertext novel at the center of this gong show is called The Unknown. It can be read, free of charge, at www.soa.uc.edu/user/unknown/ and was written principally by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg and Dirk Stratton.