Literature
An annotated collection of 5 books on literature, spanning 1944 to 1992. Featuring works by Jorge Luis Borges, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Italo Calvino and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Ficciones
Before anyone had built a computer network, Borges had already imagined its topology. "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) describes a novel that is also a labyrinth — a structure in which every decision branches into al…
Il Gattopardo
Not a technology book, but the opening conceptual frame for how technology waves actually play out. "Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi." — if we want everything to stay as it is, everything mu…
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Calvino wrote what may be the first novel that behaves like a hypertext system. The book is structured as a series of interrupted beginnings: the reader starts one novel, is diverted to another, begins that one, is diver…
Neuromancer
Gibson coined the word "cyberspace" in a short story two years earlier, but Neuromancer gave it a geography. The novel describes a "consensual hallucination" — a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks…
Snow Crash
If Gibson imagined cyberspace as an abstract datascape, Stephenson imagined it as an inhabited city. The "Metaverse" in Snow Crash is a virtual boulevard with real estate, architecture, social stratification, and economi…