Move over Kindle! Turns out Twitter offers the latest in digital publishing. Pulitzer Prize winning author Jennifer Egan published her latest novel one torturous Tweet at a time.
In a nod to the social media age, The New Yorker offered up Egans latest short story on Twitter in a series of 140-character bursts.
Black Box began appearing on the New Yorker Fiction Twitter account on May 24th around 8 p.m. ET. A single line was published every minute for an hour, then from 8-9 p.m. on each of the following nine nights, through June 2.
While waiting for new snippets might not sound like the most fun way to consume a story, lovers of the written word can take some solace in the fact that Egan, no stranger to nontraditional storytelling, wrote Black Box with Twitter in mind.
I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page.
Egan said the story was originally twice its present length and that she spent about a year writing and revising it using Twitters character-counting tool to make sure the final lines would make the cut.
However, Egan is not the first to tackle fiction on Twitter and other digital short forms.
In Japan, keitai shousetsu, or cellphone novels written in the form of text messages, have become perennial best-sellers since originating in the early 2000s.
But fear not if you cant stand the thought of reading a story tucked into your Twitter feed (of, for that matter, if you cant stand the thought of Twitter). The New Yorker published a daily summary of the story on its Page Turner fiction blog. The story also will appear in its entirety in the venerable magazine.
From CNN.com. Read the original story here.
