New Jennifer Egan Short Story To Debut On Twitter

The New Yorker will be publishing “Black Box,” a new short story by Jennifer Egan that features one of the characters from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad. And there’s a twist to this story—it will be published via Twitter. Beginning on Thursday, May 24, The New Yorker will tweet the story in ten nightly installments, from 8pm to 9pm Eastern. The full text of “Black Box” will be collected on the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog and published in The New Yorker’s Science Issue (on newsstands Monday, May 28). Follow @NYerFiction to read along!

Writing about her inspiration for the story, Egan said: “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. The story was originally 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.'”

Click here to read an excerpt from A Visit from the Goon Squad and click to buy the book.