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New Yorker Releasing Story in Tweets

Jennifer Egan's 'Black Box' serialized on Twitter

By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff

Posted May 25, 2012 12:30 PM CDT

(Newser) – The latest story from a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer will appear in 140-character chunks. The New Yorker is publishing Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" in installments on Twitter, the New York Observer reports. The tweets, which began yesterday, will appear from 8pm to 9pm every day for nine days. They'll also be collected each day at the magazine's Page-Turner blog. The whole story will appear in Monday's science fiction issue of the New Yorker.

Egan had "been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter," she tells Page-Turner. "I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea." She penned these dispatches in a Japanese notebook whose pages were divided into rectangles. At first, it was "nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now 'Black Box,'" she says.

Author Jennifer Egan is shown at her home in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Monday, April 18, 2011.
Author Jennifer Egan is shown at her home in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Monday, April 18, 2011.   (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)
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COMMENTS
Showing 2 of 2 comments
djpars
May 26, 2012 12:53 AM CDT
I suppose Egan would like to believe this is somehow the natural progression of narrative, how story fits into modern life, as evidenced by its coinciding with prominent social media. It is not. This is a gimmick; this is latching on to a successful platform for the written word and pretending the success of that platform has some organic similarity to her art. BS. I'm reminded of the scene in Family Guy where Stephen King comes up with the Lamp Monster just because a lamp is nearby.
StationaryMan
May 25, 2012 2:36 PM CDT
A novel released in tweets finally literature has its own velvet painting.
 

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