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erature and the medium in which it is written. Carrión of- In the two-page commentary “Cristina Rivera Garza’s

fers a helpful summary of the motivation behind his novels Tweets,” Edmundo Paz Soldán makes a brief but convincing

and closes with a brief discussion of quantum fiction and defense of tweets as a valid literary form, based on Mexican

parallel worlds, concluding that “interdimensional portals writer Cristina Rivera Garza’s work. Paz Soldán describes

opened in the consciousness of each reader” connect the Garza’s metaliterary commentaries and how her use of twit-

two parallel universes, that readers are more simultaneous ter forces the reader to rethink literature. Paz Soldán ar-

than ever before and that authors are more “bicephalous,” gues that each 140-character tweet not only serves as a plat-

in other words, creators and critics (20). form for aphorisms and haiku, but also shows the network

In the second article of the first section, “Post-Digitalism of dialogues that form what Rivera Garza coined a “tweet-

and Contemporary Spanish Fiction,” Germán Sierra, an- novel.” Paz Soldán’s thought-provoking comments from his

other writer of the Nocilla Generation, grounds his argu- perspective as both a member of Latin America’s McOndo

ments about contemporary Spanish fiction in contempo- generation and Cornell University’s faculty left me wishing

rary American novelists, drawing from David Foster Wallace he had fully analyzed one of Rivera Garza’s tweetnovels.

and Mark Amerika, as well as from the new media theorist The fourth article of this section is written by Doménico

and practitioner Lev Manovich. Sierra then moves to an ad- Chiappe, a Peruvian-Venezuelan writer who lives in Barce-

ept discussion of writers in Spain from what is known as the lona and is considered a member of Spain’s Mutant Gener-

Mutant Movement. This movement is a generation of young ation. In “Enveloping Literature and Other Challenges to

writers who work in the digital and challenge the conserva- the Multimedia Author” he discusses his hypermedia novel

tive Spanish definition of literature. They are also referred Tierra de extracción (2006) identifying linguistic, textual and

to as Afterpop and were nicknamed the Nocilla Genera- diegetic challenges faced by multimedia authors. After a de-

tion by the press after the publication of Agustín Fernández scription of the plots and styles used in Tierra de extracción

Mallo’s Nocilla Dream in 2006. Sierra makes acute obser- as an example of multimedia available between 1996 and

vations about the lingua franca among contemporary writ- 2006, Chiappe moves on to discuss new challenges present-

ers, noting that “a great deal of work is done, explicitly or ed by new technologies. He suggests that the next evolu-

implicitly, in universal technological codes—everybody’s tion of multimedia literature will be something he calls “en-

“non-native second language” (29). Sierra discusses the new veloping literature.” By “enveloping literature” he means a

reality and the non-traditional, global nature of contempo- novel that moves from the computer screen to public spaces

rary Spanish fiction and argues that the use of new media such as the plazas and garages. He predicts that enveloping

is not the distinctive feature of Mutant Movement writers, literature will result in a new age of reading.

but rather the media is a sign of the world in which these Rosina Conde’s “Twenty Years of Internet Exploration”

writers (and we) currently live. is endearing in the intimate, first-person account this ac-

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Revist a de alces XXI Número 1 , 2013