User:Nelsonst2004/The District of Camelot

The District of Camelot is an e-book by former New York Times staff writer Thomas Stearns (1961--2007). The book is composed of a series of interconnected HTML pages based on an experience in Washington, D.C. where, in less than twenty-four hours, Stearns attended a rigorous all-night prayer vigil, witnessed a murder, and interviewed an infamous pentecostal preacher named Benjamin Crawford. The District of Camelot is an example of mash-up literature in which one original text is combined and / or overlapped with several additional texts.

After logging into http://stearns.strongspace.com, there are five hyperlinks set up in the form of a hyper-table of contents, wherein the contents form the narrative structure of the book:

 * http://stearns.strongspace.com/information_theory
 * http://stearns.strongspace.com/speaking_in_tongues 
 * http://stearns.strongspace.com/carniphoria
 * http://stearns.strongspace.com/death_by_paper
 * http://stearns.strongspace.com/the_wounded_king

Within each section of the book, the interviews, stories, and images of several different characters appear as miniature chapters whose chronological progression is dictated by the whims of the reader. Each character’s conventional narrative begins with the hyperlinks below, though, reportedly, all of the seven stories eventually guide the reader to Tom Stearns’ interview with Benjamin Crawford, the genesis of which is the climactic scene of the story.

After the hyper-table of contents, before progressing into the narrative, the reader is directed to the book’s introduction, written by Stearns’ daughter, Terese Stearns, in which she recounts learning of her father’s death, her subsequent reconciliation with her mother, and the process of cleaning out her father’s apartment, full of paintings and books, in New York City. It is there, in his desk, that she learns of the e-book and starts reading it roughly a month after her father’s death.