Swoon

But the duo's tour-de-force is surely Swoon, an electronic literary courtship that spirals into real life in a manner Griffin & Sabine never manage. In March of 1998, Nada posted a query on a poetry discussion list, and Gary replied ""backchannel,"" asking if she were the same person who went by ""gordon"" and lived in San Francisco years earlier. Amid Sullivan's disintegrating marriage in New York and Gordon's failing Tokyo relationship, the two produced the equivalent of 5,000 manuscript pages over the course of a year as they traded quips, seductions, likes and dislikes, ideas about aesthetics, sexual preferences, photos, poems and poetry gossip, worries, fears and neuroses, plans for visits and the failure of love at first sight and its aftermath. It makes for the most true-to-life literary love story since Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett hit Florence.