Nobel Laureate publishes new novel free online

Elfriede Jelinek, a German/Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, is putting her new novel online for free as she writes it, without DRM or restrictions. Jelinek is agoraphobic and suffers from social phobia, and rarely ventures out of her home (she accepted the Nobel via a recorded video), but she finds it easy to socialize on the Internet.

"I find the Internet to be the most wonderful thing there is," Jelinek said in an e-mail interview with The Associated Press. "It connects people. Everyone can have input."

Jelinek, 60, has been posting chapters of the new book, "Neid" (German for "Envy"), as she writes them. The first two chapters of the work she describes as a "mixture of blog and prose" are already available on her site, www.elfriedejelinek.com, and there are more to come.

"It's a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet," Jelinek told the AP.

Link,

Link to Elfriede Jelinek on Wikipedia,

Link to Elfriede Jelinek's website

(Thanks, Cole!)