The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Lovely Collaborative Illustrated Micro-Narratives Supporting Independent Media
by Maria Popova“The universe is not made of atoms; it’s made of stories.”
Since 2010, Joseph Gordon-Levitt — better-known as RegularJOE in the hitRECord universe he created — has been inviting thousands of people to contribute tiny stories through words and images, then culling the best of them in an annual volume. On the heels of 2011’s volume 1 and 2012’s volume 2 comes The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 3 (public library) — a charming pocket-sized compilation featuring the work of 82 artists out of 39,905 contributions. These collaborative stories — a writer submits a story, an artist who stumbles upon it and likes it captures it visually, then the community joins in and remixes the stories and art — fall somewhere between the Exquisite Corpse game, the Six-Word Memoir series, and Félix Fénéon’s freshly illustrated three-line novels from the early 1900s.
For an added smile-inducer, half the proceeds from The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 3 go to the contributing artist and half feed right back into hitRECord — a heartening model for sustaining independent, ad-free, audience-supported media.
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