RSS Feed
May 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda In an experimental move, The New Yorker is planning to release a short sequel to Jennifer Egan‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, through 140-character installments on Twitter.
“Black Box” takes a A Visit from the Goon Squad character and paints her as a female spy in the 2030s. As she goes undercover among suspected terrorists, she keeps a mental log of events — all in dispatches of 140 characters or less.
[More from Mashable: Magazines Get Serious About Ecommerce]
The format naturally lends itself to serialization on Twitter — and indeed, Egan said that she came up the idea of tweeting the story before writing it. That’s surprising given that Egan has never been active on Twitter even as a reader, she told fiction editor Deborah Treisman in an interview to be posted to newyorker.com on Monday.
The question, she said, was figuring out what kind of story needed to be told in very short bursts.
[More from Mashable: Conde Nast to Provide Ad Metrics for Tablets]
“I had that thought in my mind, and then it converged with a few other interests: I wanted to try to write a spy story set in the future, and I was interested in telling a story in the form of a list,” she recalled. “And, out of all that, I began to have a sense of a woman’s voice speaking in these short dispatches about her spying experience. As soon as I began hearing that voice, it was clear that this would be the piece that would be, in some way, disseminated over Twitter.”
This isn’t the first time Egan’s writing has been inspired by software. The eleventh chapter of A Visit from the Goon Squad — which is narrated by 12-year-old Alice Blake, the same character who narrates the “Black Box” — is written in PowerPoint slides. As with Twitter, Egan said she had never used PowerPoint prior to writing that chapter in her novel, she said in a presentation at the 92Y in New York City last fall.
The New Yorker will tweet the first part of “Black Box” through @NYerFiction from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, May 24. The rest of the story will be released at the same hour over nine consecutive evenings. Tweets will be added to The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog at the close of each session. The entire story will appear in print in the magazine’s science fiction issue, which hits newsstands Monday.
Photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux
This story originally published on Mashable here.
Posted in 
Tags: 
