New Yorker Releasing Story in Tweets

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. (More New Yorker magazine stories.)