From the site, curated by Josh Glenn and Rob Walker:
THE IDEA
A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!
A whole bunch of writers, including but not limited to Luc Sante, Kurt Andersen, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Stewart O’Nan, Jenny Davidson, Michelle Tea, Curtis Sittenfeld, and me, have written stories about a wide variety of unlikely objects. Said objects — the actual, tangible, physical objects — will be auctioned on eBay. If you win the bidding for an object, you’ll get the object AND a printout of the story.
SPECIAL BONUS: My object’s accompanying story — and I’ll alert y’all again when it’s live on the site — is a sort of prequel to my next project, which I Cannot Yet Talk About With Specificity, but about which I am extremely excited.