Atwood, a dedicated Twitter user, volunteered to participate in the chat shortly after the club announced that her novel The Blind Assassin was its first selection. More than 1,400 votes were cast in the final, three-day voting period, Bob Cohn, editorial director of Atlantic Digital said in an earlier interview with Mashable.
People are invited to pose questions using the #1b140_q hashtag, which will be streamed on theatlantic.com.
The live author chat is just one of several discussions #1book140 members have held on Twitter so far this month. Jeff Howe, the Northeastern University professor spearheading the project, has been using reporting tool Storify, to put the discussions in context on The Atlantic's site.
#1book140
#1book140 is an expansion of a project Howe began a year ago at Wired, where he previously served as a contributing editor, called One Book, One Twitter. "What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club?" he asked, echoing a similar call made by Seattle-based librarian Nancy Pearl in 1998, which launched a series of city-wide reading clubs across the U.S.
One Book, One Twitter exceeded Howe's expectations, bringing together some 12,000 people to read and discuss Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods last year, primarily on Twitter. "The only problem? It disappeared, like barbecues and seersucker suits, when summer came to a close," he noted.
Now The Atlantic is giving him the chance to continue his mission in the form of an online monthly reading and discussion club. The club has been heavily cross-promoted on theatlantic.com's entertainment channel, as well as its Facebook and Tumblr pages.