New Jennifer Egan short story to be serialized on Twitter

No stranger to experimentation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan has written a new short story tailor-made for the social networking service Twitter. Her latest work, Black Box, will be published beginning this Thursday night as a series of tweets via The New Yorker (@NYerFiction specifically), which will later consolidate all of the tweets for its magazine. Black Box has been described as a science fiction tale about an undercover female spy - a character first introduced by Egan in her critically-acclaimed 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad - with each tweet intended to represent some sort of dispatch.

At first glance, Twitter may not seem like the ideal format to tell a coherent short story, simply because of the limitations of each tweet, but it sounds as if Egan has figured out a premise in which the idea of 140-character morsels makes logical sense. If readers feel involved enough with the protagonist and story, Black Box could be an inventive and arresting experience for both Egan fans and Twitter users. Either way, it seems like a foregone conclusion that there'll be plenty of tweeting about it during the initial broadcast.

Beginning on Thursday, May 24, the tweeting schedule for Black Box will be a new tweet's worth of text every minute between 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. The entire short story will be published over the course of 10 consecutive nights.