Short stories about thrift-store objects (that you can buy)

What makes an object meaningful? One answer is that it’s the object’s narrative, its story. I’ve written about that before on this site (and I guess I talked about it in Objectified).

But today I’m announcing another response to the question: Joshua Glenn and I are launching what I think is a pretty great experiment/art project that’s all about narratives and objects.

The project is called Significant Objects. We have rounded up a rather astonishing group of creative writers as participants. Each writer has been assigned an object — an almost-meaningless object purchased for a few dollars (tops) at a thrift store.

Each writer then invents a story about that object.

We’re putting the results on SignificantObjects.com.

And even better: We’re selling the objects on eBay, with the invented narrative as the product description. (It’s not a hoax, we make it very clear what’s going on.)

Today is the launch day: The first five writers are Luc Sante, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Annie Nocenti, Matthew Battles, and Linda Millet.

You can not only read the stories they have invented, you can buy the actual objects.

We’ll be publishing two more stories a day for the rest of the week, and then a story a day after that, throughout July and probably longer. This week alone there will be stories by Ben Greenman, Matthew Sharpe, Mark Fraunfelder, Susannah Breslin, Jonathan Goldstein, and Kurt Andersen, among others.

A full list of currently participating writers (we’re still signing up new contributors) is on the Significant Objects site.

I hope you’ll check it out. And I hope you’ll tell people. And I hope some of you will bid — in addition to the Significatn Object, you’ll get a copy of the story. (All proceeds go to the writer.)

[PS: You can keep up news of new releases as they become available via Twitter: @SignificObs.]

Thanks.