[ real pleasure in life book ]

the real pleasure in life

the real pleasure in life novel novel animated text animated text book neutral milk hotel book neutral milk hotel novel book animated typography interactive book the real pleasure in life book nonstandard english book animated text

[ a novel in animated text ]

the real pleasure in life is the first-ever novel written in dynamic typography, or animated text. while most multimedia books add videos, in this novel, the words themselves are animated. at key moments in the book, they come alive, transforming as you read them. scroll ahead to see some examples.

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i tried

but he caught me

held me there, wriggling

then dropt me.

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you trigger the animations by scrolling, so you are in control. if you miss something, scroll back and it will reset. scroll ahead to animate the paragraph below.

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my face went cold and tingly. then my neck, and my arms. my legs
i wasnt in charge of anymore,
my chest was gript with a fear i could not
name, a physical terror—

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in other words, i swoond.

[ click here to read now ]

or

[ here to read an excerpt ]

or keep scrolling to learn more about the book.

set in athens, georgia, steeped in athens music, and featuring a cast of larger-than-life eccentrics, this is the story of a single night that will change a man’s life forever—in ways that he wont fully understand until the novel’s shocking conclusion.

this writing technique was developd especially for the novel. the reason the book is written this way [ and spelld this way ] is part of the story, but you dont findout why til the end. many of the “clues” are physical scraps of text from the world of athens that find their way into the pages of the novel:

i took a left at the next street, washington, atleast thats the way i read
it, the sign actualy said

West Washintong Street

. these were regulation
street signs by the way. it wasnt a joke. or it was an official joke.

As you may know, conspiracy nuts tend to be good at predicting how
long it will take you to drive somewhere. in eighteen minutes on the dot,
i saw a sign—

Athens shitty limits

athens
shity limits

or thats what i thought it said, but

i was basicly a 5 hourenergy-zombie

at this point, so who knows?

words and images interact. this example takes place in a record shop, when the narrator checks to see if they have anything by his favorite band [ neutral milk hotel, naturally ]

They had their own section.

and a note sayin—

lots more in back just ask

in the aeroplane over the sea album cover

they had 16 copies  of aeroplane

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i picked one of them up. felt the heft

its 180-gram vinyl.

but you probly knew that.

 

 

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[ unless youd rather ]

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threw the

t a b l e

Taylor caught it.

text artifacts intermingle with type, blurring the line between text and image.

i forgot to mention there was a bar. it was
just a card table with some licker botles and mixers and plastic cups
and a sign sayin 

No teenagers!

, but taylor had installd himself behind it, and inspite of his shackles he was mixin drinks and hittin on girls with impunity.

i sat down under the tree that owns itself, leand against the trunk,
lissend to the crickets and the treefrogs and tried to make my brain
shutup, but it wouldnt do it, there were just too many questions.

i finely started makin a list:

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List. Is Claire okay? Is she mad? What's wrong with my car? How am i going to get home? What is going on?

thats as far as i got before somethin

splashd on the page.

it lookd like a raindrop exept it

wasnt rainin.

 

screenshots showing pieces of text art incorporated into pages:

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freed from the constraints of page breaks, each chapter exists as a continuous scroll. the margins are manipulated to shape the lines. the indents show the flow of the story. when the conversation or action moves in a new direction, so does the margin.

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the real pleasure in life works on any device that will run a web browser: desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones.

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Creative Commons License
the real pleasure in life is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.*