The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1

With The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, child actor turned indie virtuoso Joseph Gordon-Levitt has compiled a visual-narrative mixtape of sorts. The mini book is a compilation of illustrated micro-stories—we're talking one sentence for some—made by sixty-seven contributors known mostly by their online monikers on JGL's Internet art collective, hitRECords. Together these stories don't accumulate into a linear narrative, but they do share an aesthetic. Just take this one by Sparksee05: "One day before breakfast, an orange rolled off the counter and escaped its fate, bounding happily through the kitchen door. Filled with hope, the egg followed." Like the book's other illustrations, it's drawn in black and white, and the cartoony image of an anthropomorphized egg and a be-legged orange typifies the collection's offbeat humor. There are, however, little misses along the way, with the occasional story undermined by a cloying cutesiness, but as a whole, this mini book acts like a best-of blog post in bound form. In this sense, one might see The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories as Gordon-Levitt's answer to those who would say print media is dead. Although these tidbits have been generated through an online community, they are best enjoyed in between two palm-sized covers.