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Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter [Paperback]

Alexander Aciman , Emmett Rensin
3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
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Book Description

5 Nov 2009

Everything from Beowulf to Brontë rewritten/ruined in twenty Tweets or less in Twitterature, the hilarious expression of every book-lovers' fear of the digital age, by Alexander Acima and Emmett Rensin.

From Oedipus: PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed the old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF.

From Paradise Lose: OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL.

Perhaps you once asked yourself, 'What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince his words, muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub?'

No doubt such troubling questions would have been swiftly resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com. This, in essence, is Twitterature.

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

Here you will find over sixty of the greatest works of western literature - from Beowulf to Brontë, from Kafka to Kerouac, and from Dostoevsky to Dickens - each distilled through the voice of Twitter to its purest, pithiest essence.

Including a full glossary of online acronyms and Twitterary terms to aid the amateur, Twitterature provides everything you need to master the literature of the civilized world, while relieving you of the burdensome task of reading it.

From Dante's Inferno: I'm havin' a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought by iPhone.

'Hilarious' Sunday Times

'Wittily irreverent, scandalous, but sure to inspire a cult following' Daily Mail

'An irreverent, profane and sometimes brilliant collection' Reuters

'The trouble with Twitter is, I think, that too many twits might make a tw*t' David Cameron

'A tool to aid the digestion of great literature' Guardian

'This is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect University of Chicago students to come up with' Professor W J T Mitchell

Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin are undergraduates at the University of Chicago. Alexander's journalism has appeared in The New York Times and New York Sun and Emmett is a contributor to the Huffington Post.


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Product details

  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (5 Nov 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0141047712
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141047713
  • Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 18.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 119,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'Hilarious' -- Sunday Times (Sunday Times )

Wittily irreverent, scandalous, but sure to inspire a cult following -- Daily Mail (Daily Mail )

'An irreverent, profane and sometimes brilliant collection' -- Reuters (Reuters )

'The trouble with Twitter is, I think, that too many twits might make a tw*t' -- David Cameron (David Cameron )

'This is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect University of Chicago students to come up with' -- Professor W J T Mitchell (Professor W J T Mitchell )

'A tool to aid the digestion of great literature' -- Guardian (Guardian )

About the Author

Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin are undergraduates at the University of Chicago. Alexander's journalism has appeared in The New York Times and New York Sun and Emmett is a contributor to the Huffington Post. They are both less than twenty years old.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Not really all that clever 24 July 2010
By egws
Format:Paperback
While I love the idea of this book, I was sorely disappointed by what I actually read. The twitter feed names are often quite humorous, and some of the tweets themselves are good, but on the whole the authors fail to properly capture the right style of either the author or the character tweeting. It's more their versions of the stories rather than the actual stories in twitter form. Love the idea, hate the execution.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Good idea, poor delivery 18 Sep 2011
Format:Paperback
The author had a good idea, but failed to deliver. The books all seem to be in the same 'voice', and this becomes tirsome after a while. There is no attempt to capture the essence of each author. Furthermore, the 'tweets' are not tweety enough. Twitter involves far more acronyms, text speak and non-standard prose that this books give- it is merely a collection of sentences limited to 140 characters.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Quite poor, do pass 25 Feb 2011
Format:Paperback
While it is an interesting concept to reduce works of literature to a pithy line, this book does not achieve that. It is somewhat misleading in that there are several rambling pages for the targeted works. More disappointing is the hyper-now (read: locked squarely in 2008) style of writing. The authors' liberal and cliché use of foul-language fails to impress. It further cheapens an already low-value effort.

The cover of the book is pretty. The rest is not so.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars @postmodernliterati: Pithy Prose 19 Nov 2009
Format:Paperback
Just bought this as a Christmas present & may need to buy a second copy.
This does what it says on the cover with sharp perception and humour.
As a once-keen reader I tend to wait for the film or TV programme now, but this captures the essence of great works of literature succinctly. You need to know a bit about classical and 20thC literature to get the jokes - it's also an educational guide for those who think only birds tweet. I'd recommend it to my mother's writing group. A great Christmas game would be reading the first lines & others guessing the book.
Last book that made me ROFL was Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget Jones's Diary: A Novel. The film was tosh.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Don't Be A Twit 16 Feb 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Nice idea, good cover design, full-marks for cashing in on the Twitter Zeitgeist, but in the end this is nothing more than a fad cash-in book that I was silly enough to fall for thanks to Amazon's recommendation software when I bought something else (Penguin book cover postcards).

Some of these might be funny, or even art, if actually delivered via Twitter, perhaps a novel per day, but in this book form it is little more than a timely stocking filler.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Funny book 7 May 2013
By Pipa
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Funny, especially if you have read the books it refers to, as you will make much more sense to you.
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Format:Paperback
Written by two students from the University of Chicago, the concept behind Twitterature is simple - take a classic piece of literature, break down the structure until it reaches 140 characters and present it as if it was being tweeted. Confused? Here's an example from George Orwell's 1984:

"Met a drab hot girl today. Slipped me a note saying she loved me. Romance is forbidden because everything good in this society is bad. Hmm."

But be warned - if you're a serious fan of literature, you might take objection to the way that these masterpieces have been distilled and re-written with contemporary jargon. And if you're not a Twitter user, you probably won't understand what the fuss is all about anyway. Otherwise, it's worth a read just for the kicks.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Not as funny as the concept sounds 15 Feb 2013
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Really great idea for a book, executed not as well as it could have been, but still amusing.

I would say though it is still a fun read which would be especially good for reading on the bus/train
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