BOOKS: Literary Classics Something To Tweet About / Parody
Heard about this book on NPR in a little 30 second spot on Morning Edition...
Have you had enough of Twitter? Think it's whittled our lives down to 140 characters. Well, prepare to be more unnerved. The publisher Penguin has commissioned a new volume of books. Well, if you can call them books. Two college students are compressing literary classics into 20 tweets or less. It's called Twitterature. Guess we've got the Cliff Notes of the 21st century. If you've got a short attention span and you want to enjoy Shakespeare, well, have at it.
From: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105892182
The US website: http://www.twitterature.us/us/index.htm
The UK website: http://www.twitterature.us/uk/index.htm
From the book site:
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.
Here you will find over eighty of the greatest works of western literature – from Beowulf to Bronte, 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.
Here is the link to Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
You might also consider an older graphic text illustrated by New Yorker Cartoonist Roslyn Schwartz called ShrinkLits: Seventy of the World's Towering Classics Cut Down to Si...
The table of contents of this book is pretty impressive -
Have you had enough of Twitter? Think it's whittled our lives down to 140 characters. Well, prepare to be more unnerved. The publisher Penguin has commissioned a new volume of books. Well, if you can call them books. Two college students are compressing literary classics into 20 tweets or less. It's called Twitterature. Guess we've got the Cliff Notes of the 21st century. If you've got a short attention span and you want to enjoy Shakespeare, well, have at it.
From: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105892182
The US website: http://www.twitterature.us/us/index.htm
The UK website: http://www.twitterature.us/uk/index.htm
From the book site:
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.
Here you will find over eighty of the greatest works of western literature – from Beowulf to Bronte, 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.
Here is the link to Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
You might also consider an older graphic text illustrated by New Yorker Cartoonist Roslyn Schwartz called ShrinkLits: Seventy of the World's Towering Classics Cut Down to Si...
The table of contents of this book is pretty impressive -
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Kelly Farrow on
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Oh, my gosh!!!! I put ShrinkLits on hold at my library and will wait w/ bated breath to put Twitterature on hold as well when someone in the system orders it!!!! These are way fun.
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