(CNN) -- At first blush, it sounds like a torturous way to read an 8,500-word short story. But in a nod to the social media age, The New Yorker is offering up new fiction on Twitter in a series of 140-character bursts. "Black Box," a new story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, was to begin appearing on the New Yorker Fiction Twitter account Thursday at 8 p.m. ET. A single line will be published every minute for the next hour, then from 8-9 p.m. on each of the following nine nights, through June 2. While waiting for new snippets might not sound like the most fun way to consume a story, lovers of the written word can take some solace in the fact that Egan, no stranger to nontraditional storytelling, wrote "Black Box" with Twitter in mind.
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The New Yorker was to begin posting a short story tweet by tweet on Twitter Thursday night
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Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" will be serialized each night for 10 nights
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A Pulitzer winner, Egan has embraced nontraditional storytelling
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Other authors have tried fiction on Twitter and in other digital forms
Call "Black Box" gimmicky if you like, but you can't claim it's just @placeholder wanting to screw around on Twitter.