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New Twitter Book Reimagines Literary Masterpieces in 140 Characters

by Amar Toor on September 21, 2009 at 10:31 AM


After successfully redefining journalism as we know it, Twitter-mania has its eyes set on its newest target: the entire canon of Western literature. Sort of.

In a forthcoming book titled 'Twitterature,' authors Emmett Rensin and Alexander Aciman survey over 60 classic works, from Goethe to Kerouac, and "twitterize" them, whittling them down to several series of 140-character tweets. The book isn't slated to be published in the U.S. until December, but the Guardian got its hands on an advance copy, and has released some titillating excerpts.

There's Romeo, for example, squeezing every drop of sorrow out of his allotted 140: "O, I am fortune's fool! Maybe just a tool. And so I die. BTW that other woman I was into before Juliet? Would've been a safer bet." Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett poses the following to her followers: "It's as if the less he seems to care about me, the more drawn to him I am. This seems the opposite of how it should be? Oh well." And then there's our personal favorite, Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road': "For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac."

Having cooked up the idea while rooming together at the University of Chicago, Rensan and Aciman remain adamant that their book isn't intended as a rendition of SparkNotes for people too ADHD to read through those remarkably brief summaries. Based on the few excerpts published thus far, 'Twitterature' seems more like coffee table fodder for the well-read, and healthily cynical. Pithy tweets will probably not replace Proust or Twain anytime soon (or at least not to the same degree that text messaged, "cell phone novels" have taken Japan's bookshelves by storm). But any resolutely self-aware riff on texting and Twitter, in the playful, satirical spirit that ostensibly seems to suffuse 'Twitterature,' can only bring smiles -- and, of course, remind us of just how ridiculous Twitter really is. [From: The Guardian]

Tags: books, literature, top, twitter, twitterature

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