WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!last year, i carved out my own short story advent calendar as my project for december, and it was so much fun i decided to do it again this year! so, each day during the month of december, i will be reading a short story and doing the barest minimum of a review because ain't no one got time for that and i'm already so far behind in all the things. however, i will be posting story links in case anyone wants to read the stories themselves and show off how maybe someone

In the near future, you might be called up to serve your country based solely on your looks & willingness to deploy these looks in service to said country.Your country may ask you to accessorize that service with some pretty heavy subcutaneous tech. Your country may be an idiot and decide the camera in your eye would be awesome if it had a flash.This flash might briefly blind you or get you killed. It may lead you into further shenanigans that get you killed. You might be killed. You are not get...

This is a spy thriller but with an intriguing angle The story is told from the point of view of the female spy; a "beauty" or honey trap whose task is to lure a specific male target and record intelligence she obtains from him. The text is in the form of extracts from the spy handbook which reflect the action As it happens. The story was originally published in daily instalments in a newspaper and is written in the form of tweets.The story and its style are original, clever and inventive; typica...

Black Box, Goon Squad #1.5 is part of the second book, The Candy House"The fact that you feel like you're dying doesn't mean that you will die.""The fact that a man has ignored and then insulted you does not mean that he won't want to fuck you."

An undercover spy is on a mission to stop bad guys from doing bad stuff – this story is a recording of her mission, her Black Box. Sounds vague and generic? Well Jennifer Egan switched things up by writing her story on Twitter! That’s right, each line is a separate tweet making up a whole story. It’s also written in my least favourite style, the second person. This means that everything refers to you. You think. You do. You are. You know. You You. You You You. YOU! Our unnamed narrator lives in

Surreal short story, originally published on Twitter, hence its original form. Once I worked out what was going on, loved this story of a human being being superhuman.

Ever read a short story which was serialised on Twitter? Black Box by Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan was published by the New Yorker Twitter account over nine days in 2012, and hence is comprised of lines containing less than 140 characters.Below is part 1 of 47:People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you've seen pictures.The first thirty seconds in a person's presence are the most important.If you're having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting.Necessary i...

You can read Black Box in a traditional format on certain websites, but reading it as Egan intended makes the reading a completely different and far better experience. The narrator is a spy, dictating notes in her head, giving advice to those who might follow in her footsteps. In this way, the reader understands what is happening to her in an indirect way. The suspense, the sense of a limited perspective, the feeling of unfamiliarity with one’s environment, all of these are accentuated by Egan’s...

THIS SHORT STORY WAS AMAZING!!!!!! LOVEEE POSTHUMAN VIBES “some citizen agents have chosen not to return / they have left their bodies behind and now they shimmer sublimely in the heavens / in the new heroism, the goal is to transcend individual life, with its petty pains and loves, in favour of the dazzling collective / you may picture the pulsing stars as the heroic spirits of former agent beauties / you may imagine Heaven as a vast screen crowded with their dots of light”

The death of the traditional book21 April 2013 Despite this being a novella and also appearing in a magazine, I simply could not leave off making some comments on this rather unusual piece of literature. I guess this is something that you would call post-modern, but the way the story is constructed, and the uniqueness of it, is what makes it intriguing. Basically it is a simple spy story, but it was originally told through a number of Twitter™ posts over a period of a week and the story unfolds

Saying that this short story is both interesting and uninteresting at the same time might seem contradictory, but it's not, since whereas the story succeeds in being intriguing by the means of its innovative narrative devices-especially considering the gradual revelation of the identity of the narrator-one must not forget that, at its core, it's a vulgar and cliched spy thriller that's supposed to be a page turner, but even fails at that, thanks to its boring substance and irrational concept.I w...

Oh my God this is incredible

Disturbing, engaging, wonderfully weird.

Black Box is another story by Egan, along the lines of her narrative experiments in A Visit From The Goon Squad. A story told in Twitter-size sentences, moments of bizarre poetry happen on nearly every page. Using a second-person limited (I think?) point of view is confusing at times, and has an ethereal quality at others. The 'black box' is what you're reading, a tape of narrated instructions of the agent's spy work as she does her mission. An interesting technique, but a little unweildy.The in...

If you ignore the format that it was written in, it's a pretty alright story.

J Egan, I have reevaluated your writing...I wrote a very unhappy, negative review of your novel, A Visit From The Goon Squad, here on GR, which I continue to recall with unhappy shudders.But this story--what a delight! And reading it this afternoon in the early fall warm sunshine in my backyard, a stack of New Yorkers before me, I completely forgot that it had been originally published via Twitter, and that each line meets Twitter's demands of 140 characters or less.Certainly I was aware that ea...

A lot of “may”, “should”, “likely” and “probably” in this short story, originally from twitter and now readable via the New Yorker website (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...).The narrator felt very detached (allmost like she is drugged) during this short sci-fi spy short story. She is a beautiful woman of 33 who is send out by America to the Mediterean, where she is shadowing her new “Designated Mate”. This shadowing is done in a very high tech fashion, the unnamed narrator feels more and...

An interesting little story. I was confused until I learned from the other reviewers that it was originally tweeted, hence the bizarre format. I thought it was supposed to be a set of instructions prior to the agent's deployment but that theory broke when it became obvious things weren't hypothetical, that they were actually happening. Not sure why it's written like it is (if-then format) but it was enjoyable. I'm not convinced twitter makes for good storytelling unless used in extremely specifi...

Why is it some reviewers are so easy to provide 5 or 4 *s just because they are fans of the author, are first to review, or just can't say a bad thing because they don't want to hurt someone feelings?That's how I feel with Black Box,I agree it's unique and interesting, but did I really enjoy it or consider it the best? That's what we're essentially saying here by giving it anything more than 3 stars. With three were saying that we liked it, with two its just ok, and one we disliked it. So how di...

I saw Jennifer Egan at 2018 National Book Festival. Several readers mentioned Black Box, so I looked it up and found it on The New Yorker. This traditional action-packed spy story with a high-tech enhanced-human makeover was apparently first "published" on twitter. The format is innovative indeed! I don't usually read spy stories but I enjoy reading Black Box. Second Person Point of View works well here--it brings the right level of disorientation to the reading experience. The constant musing o...