The New Yorker is Going to Tweet an 8,500 Word Story

Jennifer Egan is a short story writer and novelist who lives in Brooklyn. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011 for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. Now that you know who Jennifer Egan is, you can know that The New Yorker is planning to tweet an entire 8,500 word short story of hers from their New Yorker Fiction account. Twitter, as you may recall, only allows messages of 140 characters or less.

Because sending out 8,500 words through a service that caps messages at 140 characters will be a hefty and obnoxious undertaking, The New Yorker will be tweeting the story over a span of ten days, starting tonight. The New Yorker will begin tweeting at 8 PM EST, unleashing one tweet per minute until 9 PM EST.

The short story, entitled “Black Box,” will feature a character from the aforementioned award winning novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad. Reportedly, each tweet will be a new entry in a spy’s mission log. Yeah, it’ll be even more annoying if any sentences in the story are longer than 140 characters and have to be broken up into multiple tweets.

Luckily for fans of Egan’s writing or people interested in short stories in general who don’t want to deal with serial story tweets, The New Yorker will be posting a recap of the hourly tweets each night after the tweet barrage is over, and the whole story will be appearing in next week’s Monday Science Fiction issue of the magazine anyway.

(The New Yorker via Vulture)

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James Plafke