Twitter Lit, Twitter Poems, Twitter Reviews and Twitter BookClubs
Novels, poems, reviews and bookclubs: 140 words at a time!Via the digitalist
One-time Macmillan New Writing author, Roger Morris, and now hugely successful crime fiction writer, R.N. Morris is twitterizing his novel A Gentle Axe.
Roger writes about this experience on his blog:
That said, I was interested in how this way of receiving text differs as a reading experience from sitting down and reading a book.
It’s true, getting a sentence or a fragment every hour – that’s how I am now scheduling my tweets – is not like sitting down and reading an extended section of the book through. You won’t necessarily remember what went before. The text will work on the reader in a different way – but I am interested to see just how.
I like the way my sentences pop up every hour. It’s interesting for me, as the writer, to see them like that in isolation. They take on, if not a different meaning, then a different power – stranger, more enigmatic.
You can start reading the novel here.
2. PICADOR LAUNCHES 140-CHARACTER BOOK CLUB
Via Galleycat
The club begins with Yoko Ogawa‘s “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” which will be discussed on April 10, 2009 in pithy Twitter posts. Upcoming book club titles include: “A Wolf at the Table” by Augusten Burroughs, “The Story of a Marriage” by Andrew Sean Greer and “Last Last Chance” by Fiona Maazel.
The book club has its own webpage, with information about sign-up and today’s giveaway: “[Sign up for Twitter] then ‘follow’ Picador here so you can hear about the upcoming announcements and discussions.
Follow booksin140‘s Twitter account to read short book reviews.
From the website:
Books in 140 started when Erin decided to validate her book buying addiction by writing “reviews.” Except long reviews are hard. And take time. Erin thought she’d solve this problem by writing reviews in 140 characters on twitter. The book buying validation is solved. The review writing is not.
4. BEN OKRI’S TWITTER POEM
Via guardian.co.uk
Short, lucid writing is needed in these uncertain times, according to the Booker prize-winning Nigerian author Ben Okri, who is releasing a new poem line by line on Twitter.”Forms follows adversity – we live in uncertain times. I think we need a new kind of writing that responds to the anxiety of our age and yet has brevity,” he said. “My feeling is that these times are perfect for short, lucid forms. We need to get more across in fewer words. The Twitter poem tries to respond to this and the feeling of freedom.”
You can read the Twitter poem here.
5. THE GOOD CAPTAINVia loose-fish.com
The Good Captain is an adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno.” Melville’s original story relies upon the main character’s first-person perceptions of the events that unfold in front of him. This reliance on P.O.V. is why I chose to distribute the story using the web service Twitter. Twitter limits updates to 140 characters of text, and so this story is broken up into small, 2-3 line paragraphs.
The temporal nature of this storytelling method required that the story include frequent reminders of previous events, to help keep readers aware of the context of the events. This was especially important given that the time span of the bulk of the events is about twelve hours, and the length of time that the story ran for was four months.
The Good Captain began broadcasting over Twitter on November 3, 2007. It concluded on February 29, 2008. The original page can be viewed at www.twitter.com/goodcaptain.
Or you can visit this site to read the book in a different format.
Image Source: Matt Hamm
