Lord Byron might have been furious. Hemingway outraged. Austen inwardly irritated. But the inevitable has happened: their prose has been reimagined through Twitter and will be published in a book distilling more than 60 classic works of literature.
There was a minor publishing sensation this summer when Penguin announced that it had bought the rights for the book, Twitterature, in which two first year university students summarise everything from Medea to Madame Bovary.
The book is not published in the UK until 5 November but an advance copy has been seen by the Guardian.
Romeo tweets his dying lament: O, I am fortune’s fool! Maybe just a tool. And so I die. BTW that other woman I was into before Juliet? Would’ve been a safer bet.
Sherlock Holmes says: Continuing investigation. Made brilliant deductions on many snorts and very little evidence. Notice salt deposits on factory owner’s shoes?
Goethe’s Young Werther emotes: Have I noted how upset I am? I am very upset. #pain #angst #suffering #sexdep.
Elizabeth Bennet muses: It’s as if the less he seems to care about me, the more drawn to him I am. This seems the opposite of how it should be? Oh well.
And then there’s Ishmael from Moby-Dick: We set out. Follow @starbuck, @queequeg for long introspective soliloquies on the human soul. Or @tashtego if you like adorable kittens.
The book’s authors, Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, have set up a Twitter page for the book and on Friday tweeted Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (example: HOLY SHIT!!!! We stole the Codex for a large-scale conspiracy that is conveniently in my area of expertise!).
Rensin and Aciman came up with the idea for the book when they were roommates at the University of Chicago. “We spent a lot of our time with three feet between us,” said Rensin.
He said the book should not be seen as some sort of guide to the classics. “There has been some misunderstanding about the book in that it’s been said it’s going to educate people, but you couldn’t do an English class with this book. The humour is heightened by having knowledge of the works.”
Rensin eulogises Twitter, declaring it nothing less than an extension of the Enlightenment, and for anyone throwing their hands up in horror at tweeting classic works, he invoked Martin Luther. “People were horrified when he translated the Bible from Latin into German but he was making it accessible. I don’t think anyone killed Luther so maybe we’re all right.”
All the works have been distilled into 20 tweets or fewer. On the Road has just the one: “For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac.” – guardian.co.uk