As readers, we have expectations for the last page of a book. A gentle wrapping up of loose ends or a sudden, thrilling twist. The last wisps of a denouement or an abrupt stop like a car crash. When even the unexpected has ceased to be a big surprise, it’s rare to find a text that truly does something original with its final page.

All of 100, by Lara Ortiz-Luis, Wyatt Roy, and Chris Rurik, is packed with surprises from beginning to end, not the least of which is its last page. The book is a collection of 100-word pieces, ranging from short stories to poems, from impressionistic word games to one-scene dramatic sketches. As its back cover says, the stories aim to be “just long enough to immerse you in their outlooks, and just short enough to keep you wondering for the rest of the day.”

And on page 100, where one would expect to find the 100th 100-word story—the clincher, the climax, the ultimate joke, or something—is something entirely different and unexpected: a blank page with the title, “The Last Piece Is Your First.”

All of 100 is not just a book—it’s a project. As the introduction states (yes, in 100 words), “Intent on approaching our writing as a discipline, we created two inflexible rules—exactly 100 words, every day…. We encourage everyone on earth to try it.” Those readers who take up the challenge, on the blank final page or beyond, can go to www.allof100.org, where others have already started sharing their own 100-word pieces.

On its surface, All of 100 fits perfectly into today’s cultural landscape. Taking a hint from social media and signifying on the death of the attention span in the modern world, the book sets short stories and Twitter on a collision course to create a new genre defined by its own arbitrary limitations.

On a deeper level, however, All of 100 is a rumination on the utter power of language—the ability of well-chosen words to create a well-crafted character in a matter of sentences, an entire universe in a paragraph or two.

Some pieces do, of course, fall flat. Some are clumsy; others aim at profundity that one simply cannot accomplish in a matter of sentences, and their failure is obvious, even pretentious. Yet the authors always maintain a light touch, an awareness of the underlying playfulness inherent in their project, and it is this sensibility, this willingness to play, which makes All of 100 a success.

In “Read This Poem and See What Happens,” Rurik seems to pick up on this theme directly when his speaker contemplates would happen “if the things you read went through your digestive tract like food…[s]o you actually pooped out what you read.” The speaker muses that “Camus would make you constipated,” and “Tolstoy would produce long, ornate icicles.” This piece is, of course, purposefully scatological yet not childish, more like a deranged English professor than a ten-year-old on a sugar high. The speaker simultaneously flouts his own literary knowledge and confesses his love for turning it upside-down just for fun.

Indeed, throughout the book, wordplay is frequent and delightful, the kind that comes to life when spoken. As Rurik writes in “Words/MY MIND,” a piece with more momentum than a freight train, “Spirals shellacking sounds like papyrus stacking and a virus attacking but the breeze brings things meant for the trees, the leaves, the miniscule prophesies of a thousand degrees of periscopes and perishing hopes…” Roy, too, takes his turn at adventurous, vivid language, with lines like “Drip through year ears thick promiscuous blips/ Supple succulent squids of linguistic fizz blitz” in “Taste These Words,” itself a rumination on the possibilities of unconventional language.

Yet these adornments are merely garnish for the truly powerful storytelling that lies in the pieces beneath, surprisingly deep for their 100-word constraint. Roy’s “Morning” quickly and effortlessly sketches a typical morning in the life of an average couple—she singing Norah Jones and Carly Simon in the shower, he blocking it out with earplugs (“Medium size, EZ Foam, one buck”) before she finishes and departs for work. “Sleep well? Yep. Be back at six. That’s fine.” As the girl heads out the door, Roy’s speaker slams the piece home in its final line with the characters’ unspoken thoughts, daggers in the reader’s heart: “I’m seeing someone else. Me too.”

Others have pathos and punch lines, sometimes side-by-side. In Ortiz-Luis’s “The Disco Age,” we meet Robert, an old man “losing his hearing, his memory, and all control of his bowels…. His one remaining passion was disco music.” The speaker tells us how he still listens to stories from his children and grandchildren but also the music of his youth. We like him but pity him, too, as his “tired joints…crackle in time with the synthesizers.” But we chuckle and sigh with the last sentence—when he takes his glasses off, “Suddenly the whole world was a disco ball.”

Ultimately, the power of All of 100 lies in its inclusivity, its irresistible call. “See, writing is easy!” it seems to call at the conclusion of each piece. “100 words—how hard can that be?” And the truth is, with writing so infectiously joyous, so innocent and playful yet so unexpectedly moving, the authors’ call demands an answer—what could 100 words do for you?