Return to Circa '96

Return to Circa '96 is built like the institution it is about: its chapters are ordered by Dewey Decimal. The premise is a single year in the life of a small-town public library meeting the World Wide Web for the first time, narrated by Jeremiah D. Angelo, editor of the library's "riverrun" newsletter. The novel embeds two sixteen-page mock issues of that newsletter inside its own pages.

The manuscript took First Place in the Novel category of the 2005 Utah Original Writing Competition in its earlier "Circa: 96" form, then a decade later won the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, which brought it to JEF.