Bars have a way of attracting storytellers—of both the professional and the hobbyist variety. For every barfly unspooling a wandering yarn to friends new and old, there’s another alone in the corner booth, held fast in the grip of creativity’s lightning strike, scribbling the next Great American Novel on a cheap napkin. In fact, it’s a time-honored literary tradition: a young Aaron Sorkin drafted A Few Good Men on cocktail napkins during his bartending shifts, while Esquire alum Ernest Hemingway penned his most infamous work of flash fiction on a bar napkin at The Algonquin Hotel (“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”).
That’s why, in 2007, the Esquire Fiction Department undertook an ambitious project: we mailed 250 cocktail napkins to writers all across the country, asking them to submit works of short fiction confined to the blank space. We received nearly 100 napkin stories in return—a wide range of tall tales about everything from sex to poetry to plans for murder. We published them all, and we called it The Napkin Project.
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