(Photo: The New Yorker)

Starting tonight, Jennifer Egan’s latest short story, “Black Box,” will be tweeted by The New Yorker‘s fiction department (@NYerFiction) over 10 nightly instalments. The story will appear in its entirety in the magazine’s June 4 issue, on newsstands May 28.

“Black Box” places one of Egan’s characters from her Pulitzer Prize“winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad into a futuristic spy thriller, told in a series of 140-character notes. On The New Yorker‘s books blog, Page-Turner, Egan writes:

I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one “ because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. 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.