Raconteur

Overview

Raconteur is a reading platform for serialized fiction and the essay — built for a literary quarterly, not a bookshop.

It ships the things readers of serial fiction actually come back for. Bookmarks save your exact place in a chapter, with an excerpt of the sentence you stopped on. Reading progress is written continuously as you scroll, so returning offers to put you back where you were — it offers, it never hijacks your scroll. A “Continue reading” shelf on the home page picks up every serial you are partway through, and a My Library page collects what you are reading, what you marked and what you finished. Readers can set type size, leading, typeface and column measure independently of the paper / sepia / night colour modes. All of it is device-local, and the Library page says so plainly rather than implying an account you do not have.

Around that sits a real publication: novels with chapters, standalone essays, a shared genre taxonomy, contributor archives where every byline links to that author’s whole body of work, and per-chapter comments so readers can argue about an installment the week it lands.

The demo is not filler. Six original novels across six genres and three lengths — a single-chapter short story, complete novellas, ongoing serials — twenty-one chapters of real prose, plus three essays on the craft of reading. That matters here, because the theme’s analytical layer computes against the real corpus: a live word-frequency field fit against Zipf’s law, and a genuine Flesch-Kincaid readability scorer with a hand-checkable self-test. Both are presented as what they are — instruments, shown in a labelled section, not decoration dressed up as a hero.

Every cover is real photography under a deterministic per-novel colour grade, so a title always renders in the same tint. All imagery is CC0 or Creative Commons with full per-file attribution in CREDITS.txt.