Inception star Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn’t just a consummate actor-artist himself — he’s inspiring a worldwide community of artists to create together through his online production company hitRECord. The latest spin-off of his collaborative multimedia project is the ingeniously illustrated Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1 (It Books), a print collection of works from the website. The title describes the book pretty accurately: Some of the stories inside are witty, some of them are meaningful, but all are very, very brief.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: For people who haven’t come into contact with hitRECord yet, explain what it is in your own words.
JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT: It’s an open, collaborative production company. As much as I love acting, I also like telling stories, making little short films, music, art, writing, etc. Normally when an actor starts a production company, it’s sort of an insular, Hollywood thing, but I wanted to collaborate with all of these artists all over the world who are making beautiful art and don’t necessarily have the connections to work in Hollywood. That’s why we use the Internet and we put these projects that we do online, and anybody can contribute to them. I’m there directing, participating, curating, and editing, and we make things together. “Tiny Stories” is our most popular collaboration that we’ve ever had. It’s really easy to contribute to it. As it says on the back on the book, we had 8,000 contributions that came into this collaboration. From that we edited it down into this tiny book. READ FULL STORY »