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Wednesday 16 April 2014

Twitter inspires book to retell classics in 'Tweets'

Twitter has inspired a new book which will retell some of the world's greatest literary works in fewer than 20 sentences each.

Twiiter's homepgae: Twitter beginner's guide
A new book, called Twitterature, will comprise abridged versions of classic novels, written in the style of Tweets – short messages sent via the social networking service 

The compilation, called Twitterature, will comprise abridged versions of classic novels, written in the style of Tweets – short messages sent via the social networking service.

Its authors, US students Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman, have been commissioned by the publisher Penguin to write the book which will hit shelves later this year.

Their aim is to shave down the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling, to no more than 20 140-character Tweets.

The two 19-year-olds claim to be starting a revolution from their college dormitory at the University of Chicago, where they have just completed their first year of studies.

They promise that their work will be a "humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format" aimed at people aged between 18 and 35.

Explaing their inspiration for the book on their website, the pair claim: "We had an epiphany.

"What, we asked, are the grandest ventures of our or any generation? And what, to give this a bit more focus, best expresses the souls of 21st century Americans?"

They concluded that the two most important platforms of expression for their generation were literature and Twitter, and so embarked on a project to entwine the two.

The statement on their site adds: "More than any other social networking tool, Twitter has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge that is the essence of our contemporary world.

"So what could be better than to combine the two? After all, as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?"

It is not yet known which of the classics they plan to tackle but facing them is the challenge of condensing works such as Dante's Divine Comedy from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences.

Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less is due out this autumn.

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