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Books to Twitter

Robert

Robert

Active Member
Just when you thought you heard it all. . .

US students hope to bring Twitterature to the masses

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.
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Whether they are right and fulfil their dreams depends on the appetite for reading Dante's Divine Comedy reduced from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the JK Rowling series, rendered in 2,800 characters down from 784 pages.
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This is the Executive Executive Executive summary.

Kinda neat in a weird kind of way.
 
Twitterature is like a modern version of Marvel's comic book adaptations of the classics. I agree with sparkchaser. In a way, highly condensed classics seem like a good idea, somehow--like a distillation of genius into a few moving droplets.
 
MarkCool said:
Sorry, I don't have any exact idea about the issue.:)
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Well, thanks for sharing.

I saw this book in a shop the other day and leafed through it. I'll confess I chuckled a bit at the On The Road entry, which just said something like:

For a twitter version of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, see On The Road by Jack Kerouac.
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Here's a link to the book in question. I see it comes out on my birthday. *cough*hint*cough*

I wonder: if you read Twitterature on a Kindle, would the Universe implode?
 
Nuts. And all along we thought it was the Large Hadron Collider that was going to seal our doom.
 
OK, the reviews are hysterical:

"Do you hear that? It's the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Twitterature makes me want to punch someone, preferably the 'authors'. They're in Chicago. I'm gonna take a road trip..."
--@damig, Twitter

"JUst f*#%&ng shoot me now..."
--Mike C, grouchyconservativepundits.com
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Sample tweets:

From Hamlet: WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN???

From the Harry Potter series: Oh man big tournament at my school this year!! PSYCHED! I hope nobody dies this year, and every year as if by clockwork.

From The Great Gatsby: Gatsby is so emo. Who cries about his girlfriend while eating breakfast...IN THE POOL?
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I bought Twitterature for my sister for Christmas, so I got to read it myself too. Some of it is pretty dumb, but there are some that work pretty well. The Iliad, for instance.
Homer said:
Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles Peleus' son, the ruinous wrath that
brought on the Achaians woes innumerable, and hurled down into Hades
many strong souls of heroes, and gave their bodies to be a prey to dogs
and all winged fowls; and so the counsel of Zeus wrought out its
accomplishment from the day when first strife parted Atreides king of
men and noble Achilles.
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@Achilles said:
Pissed. So very very pissed.
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