Saturday 16th May 2026, Rosemead, 8.52pm.

#225,417 — A young boy who has always looked up to his brother yearns for an occasion to prove that he, like him, is also somebody. He writes and sells his novels on the street, ‘ready while you wait’ style, and he takes as a basis for his sixty-second plots the personal stories of the passers-by interested in being his clients, characters and owners of the novels.

Dora García, Twenty-three million, five hundred and eighty-six thousand, four hundred and ninety stories, 2013 ‑ ongoing.

See this in the logbook

Tell me another

What is this?

Monday 26th August 2013, London.

#2,527 ‑ An artist wants to write all the stories in the world. She meets a cartographer and an inventor. The inventor makes a machine to make old stories new. The new stories are stranger than the originals.

Dora García worked with technologist Henry Cooke to create this project for the London Bookshop Map iPhone app. The app allows users to generate a story by pressing a button. The stories that users create by pressing the button become part of Dora García’s Twenty-three million, five hundred and eighty-six thousand, four hundred and ninety stories (2013 ‑ ongoing) and are updated immediately to a blog.

For the launch of Dora García's solo exhibition “Segunda Vez” at MNCARS, Madrid, Henry has developed a new version of this work in Spanish: Veintitrés millones, quinientos ochenta y seis mil cuatrocientas noventa historias. The original English and new Spanish versions have been made available at twentythreemillionstories.org and veintitresmillonesdehistorias.org, and display automatically when accessing MNCARS museum wifi.

A theoretical 23,586,490 stories can be generated by the program which uses text from Dora García’s All the Stories project. With a restricted format of four lines, this collaborative and participatory project started in 2001 and had collected over 2,527 stories at the time of writing. The first 2512 stories were published as a book (Book Works and Eastside Projects) and you can view the most recent stories or submit your own at the All the Stories blog.

The project was commissioned by Louise O’Hare for The London Bookshop Map and funded by The Elephant Trust. The London Bookshop Map promotes independent bookshops and commissions and distributes new work by contemporary artists.
www.thelondonbookshopmap.org

Back to the story