2012

2012 is the publication year that anchors the documented release history of Black Box, a story whose compact, segmented form grew out of Jennifer Egan’s experiment with online fiction. The year connects its appearances in The New Yorker and on Twitter with the author’s account of a lengthy process of shaping its form; it is not identified as a date within the story’s fictional action.

Publication and Copyright

Black Box was first published in The New Yorker and online, via Twitter, by @NYerfiction in 2012. Its UK edition was published in the same year by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd. The book’s copyright notice likewise names 2012, placing the story’s magazine, online, and UK publication information within one documented year.

Composition and Form

In the author’s note, Egan explains that the story’s working title was Lessons Learned. She wanted its shape to emerge from lessons the narrator derived at each step, rather than from straightforward narration of events. That design made the story seem suited to serialization on Twitter, an experiment she had long wanted to try. Egan identifies the intimacy of reaching readers through their phones and the poetic possibilities of the 140-character limit as part of the medium’s appeal.

The year of composition is not specified as 2012: Egan says instead that she wrote the story by hand in a Japanese notebook with eight rectangles on each page, then spent a year controlling and calibrating the material into its final form. This account makes the finished work’s brevity a product of sustained shaping, rather than simply a consequence of posting fiction in short units.

Genre and Transformation

Egan describes another impulse behind Black Box as taking a character from a naturalistic story into a different genre. She had considered making a cartoon version of a character from A Visit From the Goon Squad; for this story, she instead imagined a spy-thriller version. Her reference point was Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!, whose characters move through books rendered in radically different styles. The comparison frames Black Box as a deliberate transformation of a character and mode, rather than a straightforward continuation of the earlier novel.