I started reading Reed's work not when I was at Wesleyan, where she teaches, but years later, when I found her collection of stories Seven for the Apocalypse in a giveaway box at USA Today. I read that book in 1999, and I picked up @Expectations in 2000; it's a moving exploration of the meaning of anonymous cyber-worlds (picking up on MUDs and presaging Second Life) and the possibility (or impossibility) of intimacy in the Internet age. As a woman becomes more and more involved with a man online, we begin to wonder if these people ever are able to connect, and the ending lends a great deal of poignancy to their relationship. I need to read her latest, Enclave, at some point, probably next year.
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