Texas Writer Doug Dorst’s Meta-Collaboration with J.J. Abrams

This is not a book to read on your Kindle.

S. arrives in a sleeve, and unsheathed it looks like it could be an old library book, complete with an index card and dewey decimal sticker. The pages have been browned and stained, and in the margins of each page is a scribbled conversation between two readers as they annotate the story they’re both ostensibly reading: Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka. Tucked into the book’s pages, the reader might encounter a dirty napkin, a postcard, or a map. Just as Eric and Jen, the two characters scribbling in the margins, are becoming enmeshed in a story they don’t quite understand, readers will find themselves challenged to decode the mysterious S. 

It’s all part of the literary puzzle conceived by filmmaker and producer J.J. Abrams and penned by Texas writer Doug Dorst, author of the novel Lost in Necropolis and a short story collection, The Surf Guru. He currently teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Dorst will be speaking and signing S. at BookPeople on December 9 at 7 p.m.