Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
The Catcher in the Rye
The Da Vinci Code
Paradise Lost
The Metamorphosis
The Stranger
Oedipus the King
Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage
Slaughterhouse Five
Harry Potter (1-7)
The Red and the Black
Macbeth
The Hobbit
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Great Gatsby
The Iliad
Hamlet
The Overcoat
The Old Man and the Sea
The Inferno
A Hero of Our Time
Beowulf
Candide
Doctor Faustus
Emma
Enderʼs Game
Great Expectations
Heart of Darkness
King Lear
Lysistrata
In Cold Blood
Medea
Nineteen Eighty-Four
On the Road
Notes from Underground
Of Mice and Men
Robinson Crusoe
Romeo and Juliet
Anna Karenina
Sherlock Holmes
Eugene Onegin
The Crying of Lot 49
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Odyssey
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Sound and the Fury
The Story of My Life
All Quiet on the Western Front
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Ulysses
Venus in Furs
Waiting for Godot
Watchmen
Mrs Dalloway
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Lolita
Gulliverʼs Travels
The Wall
Pride and Prejudice
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Frankenstein
All the Pretty Horses
Swannʼs Way
The Aeneid
The Devil in the Flesh
Dracula
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Waste Land
Lady Chatterleyʼs Lover
Jane Eyre
Aliceʼs Adventures in Wonderland
The Tempest
Madame Bovary
Death in Venice
The Three Musketeers
Twilight
Moby-Dick
Don Quixote
The Canterbury Tales
Sgt Pepperʼs Lonely Hearts Club Band
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Index
PENGUIN BOOKS
TWITTERATURE
“The classics are so last century.”—The Guardian
“Sincerest apologies to Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Joyce: how were we to know it would come to this?”—Mashable.com
“The trouble with Twitter is, I think, that too many twits might make a twat.”—David Cameron
“Twitterature makes me want to punch someone, preferably the ‘authors.’ They’re in Chicago. I’m gonna take a road trip.”
—@damig, Twitter
“A move likely to be greeted by book lovers with a mixture of horror and why-didn’t-I-think-of-that jealousy.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Just f *#%ing shoot me now.”
—Mike C., grouchyconservativepundits.com
ALEXANDER ACIMAN was born in 1990. A sophomore at the University of Chicago, he was graduated from Horace Mann School in New York City. He has worked in the offices of several publications, including The Paris Review and the late New York Sun, which he and the city of New York mourn every day upon noticing its absence from every newsstand as the copper sun rises to greet the metropolis. He has published many articles in both his high school and college newspapers, as well as three feature article-essays in The New York Times and one in The New York Sun. He is also a devoted follower of Napoleon Bonaparte. He believes that there is no better way to start a day than with a run or a bike ride, and is known on occasion to enjoy a game of bocce or to engage in pugilism. He would like to write, own a pair of John Lobb shoes, and live out his days reading and writing in the Mediterranean basin with his brothers.
EMMETT RENSIN was born in 1990. He is a sophomore at the University of Chicago, before which he attended the finest parochial school in all of Los Angeles. A Huffington Post contributor and ordained reverend, and unable to tie his shoelaces at the tender age of sixteen, he gave it all up to pursue his true dream: putting stickers on books. This he did with care and devotion for many long hours, ensuring that every book in the reference library of the world-renowned Museum of Jurassic Technology at which he was employed had its lovely laminated ascension number neatly stuck upon its spine. He emerged from this a brighter and more worldly man. Rensin contributes to the University of Chicago’s Chicago Maroon as well as the Huffington Post but takes care to balance his stresses with the relaxing arts of coat collection and Richard Nixon enthusiasm. Such balance is necessary, as extremity might cause Rensin’s untimely death and prevent him from accomplishing his three life goals: penning the Great American Novel, mastery of card magic, and telling the perfect shaggy-dog joke.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Penguin Books 2009
Copyright © Alexander Aciman and Emmett L. Rensin, 2009
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Aciman, Alexander.
Twitterature : the world’s greatest books in twenty tweets or less /
Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-16282-8
1. Best books—Humor. 2. Twitter. I. Rensin, Emmett. II. Title.
PN6231.B62A36 2009
818’.607—dc22 2009040344
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated.
http://us.penguingroup.com
Dedicated in Loving Memory
to the Victims of the R.M.S. Titanic
Introduction
Life can offer us no
greater treasure than art. It is all that is beautiful, and all that allows a man’s soul to take leave of the quotidian trifles that molest his waking mind, to be lifted to the highest peaks of experience, and to peer briefly into the sublime. It is that which removes man from the static residue of time and casts him into the gentle waters of the eternal. It is to hear and to speak softly in the beauteous tongue of antiquity, and yet to foresee all that will unfold through the illimitably growing passage of our universe.
In short, art is pretty sweet.
What a tragédie, then, that so many modern people find the great works of literature inaccessible, overwhelming, and even, perhaps, dull. It is not a defect of their character, nor any special ineptitude that has disposed them in this manner; rather, these great texts - timeless as they may be - are, in their present form, outdated. Who but college students, hermits, and disciples of the disgraced John Ludd can muddle through them with any hope of understanding? This is what we seek, through our humble efforts, to remedy.
While some may describe the reinvention of our world’s Great Works to suit the ever-evolving brain of the modern man as ‘a triviality’, ‘a travesty’, or ‘that sucks’, we prefer to think of ourselves as modern-day Martin Luthers. Herr Luther took the Holy Scripture itself, and seeing that the classic Vulgate no longer spoke to the souls of his contemporaries, he translated it into the vernacular of his time. By doing so, Luther unleashed a revolution of faith and literacy upon sixteenth-century Europe that had not been seen before and has not been equaled since.
In our own way, and in our own time, we hope to do the same.
However, it’s probably best if we stay clear of the Bible.
You may be wondering, good sirs, what exactly we intend to do with these great works of art. What one must keep in mind is that the literary canon is not valued for its tens of thousands of dull, dull words but for the raw insight into humanity it provides. While perhaps an unwieldy tome was the best method of digesting this knowledge during a summer spent in the Victorian countryside in the Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Three, times have changed. Virginity must not be distracted with books, nor damsel-chasing pacified with poetry. Instead we must run free into the world and not once look back.
And so, we give you the means to absorb the strong voices, valuable lessons and stylistic innovations of the Greats without the burdensome duty of hours spent reading. We take these Great Works and present their most essential elements, distilled into the voice of Twitter - the social networking tool that with its limit of 140 characters a post (including spaces) has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge - and give you everything you need to master the literature of the civilized world.
For indeed, does any man have such great pretense as to suppose that he may digest all that it is right and proper for him to have digested in the stunted mortal fit granted to him by Providence? Perhaps in the eighteenth year of your life you sat on a porch asking yourself: What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince words and muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub? Such questions are no doubt troubling - and we believe they would have been resolved were the Prince of Denmark a registered user on Twitter.com, well versed in the idiosyncrasies and idioms of the modern day. And this, in essence, is what we have done. We have liberated poor Hamlet from the rigorous literary constraints of the sixteenth century and made him - without losing an ounce of wisdom, beauty, wit, or angst - a happening youngster. Just like you, dear reader.
In brief - and we mean this literally - we have created our generation’s salvation, a new and revolutionary way of facing and understanding the greatest art of all arts: Literature.
And allow us now to open
The eternal aperture,
To the brilliant soul of common man:
We now present you . . . Twitterature.
The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger
@HoldenLolfield
Fucked up for the last time. Theyʼre throwinʼ me out of the old school! Still havenʼt seen a goddamn horse! LOL!
Do you ever wonder what they used in Egypt to embalm mummies? Itʼs special ancient mummy juice, thatʼs what it is.
Left school. Totally yelled some nasty shit down the hall - thatʼll show em! Headinʼ 2 NY soon. Hit me up.
Surrounded by phonies. Everywhere!
I tried to bone some kidʼs mom. She wasnʼt havinʼ it. I have this really gay lumberjack hat now, though.
Checked into a dingy hotel; itʼs pretty crappy. Pay per view isnʼt working. I guess Iʼll just call a hooker?
Whoa: never ever try to short a hooker. These guys called pimps come and fuck you up.
Still surrounded by phonies! I bet youʼre all phonies, too. Ugh.
Think I have mouth cancer - will keep you all updated.
Anyone know where ducks go during winter? Do they freeze??
On a date with a girl I donʼt care about. So bizarre that nature makes me do such funny, contradictory things. Hypocrisy to the max. Deep.
Decided to run away from home. I told my sister about it. Sheʼs here.
I think some dude just tried to fuck me. Yeah, some dude just tried to put his dick in me. Disgusting.
Heʼs a phony too, of course.
Sister insists on going west with me - I said no way. Women canʼt be cowboys!!
On second thought, west probably as phony as east.
Life is full of frustration and contradiction.
I miss those pricks I swore at in school. :( Even though they were phonies.
The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
@CatholicGuilt
Heading to Paris! A man is dead and the police think only my superhuman knowledge of cryptology can solve this one.
Oh fuck - the police think I killed him!!!
These idiots donʼt understand this is a CODE! Thankfully, this banginʼ - er, beautiful - French girl is helping me out.
Driving to a bank. Good time to exposit the history of all these crazy Catholic secret societies to this French girl - maybe get her hot??
HOLY SHIT!!!! We stole the Codex for a large-scale conspiracy that is conveniently in my area of expertise!
A historian explained rest of complicated conspiratorial legend. Itʼs good we keep track of all this. For the ladyʼs benefit, of course.
WTF!! A FUCKING ALBINO!! My cushy tenure at Harvard did NOT prepare me for all this action!!!
You know that old Italian dude who painted the picture of the smiling lady? Heʼs the key to all of this. LOL, who would have thought?
Police wonʼt stop chasing us! Will tweet all locations; just donʼt tell the Popo! Or the Pope.
Oh man, this gal is hot. But itʼs harder than I thought to find romance amidst a global plot to conceal the truth about Jesus Christ.
Taking a breather to solve some puzzles. ʻA Popeʼ, anybody? Thereʼs so many! Mad props if anyone can solve it.
Thanks to @dudeonthebus. Oh goddamnit, another cryptex? Jesus fucking Christ. Literally.
Canʼt someone tell this albino and the cops that weʼre just TRYING TO SOLVE A MYSTERY? Itʼs like a crossword! Everyone needs to CTFO!
Puzzles, puzzles, puzzles all day long.
So youʼre looking for something. Got a smokinʼ hot French babe with you. Then it turns out what youʼre looking for IS that babe. Yeah!
Jesus. The lady is a direct descendant of Christ. All good. Oh what? Another puzzle? Bring on the sequel!
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
@MorningStarlet
FALLING UNTO THE ABYSS!!!!! Iʼll talk more about why in several hundred pages to avoid any confusion.
OH MY GOD IʼM IN HELL.
ʼTis Pandemonium down here. Would ROFL but itʼs very hot.
Iʼm bored. Iʼm the chairman of the board. My compatriots are r-tards. Inaction? Is that the best we can do? We art fucking demons
!
Sitting on our asses waiting for an apology from G-d isnʼt exactly renegade. Pussies.
Anyone heard anything about Earth? Good? Bad? Will be there tonight bringing the MOTHAFUCKINʼ RUCKUS. If anyone wants in, txt it.
On second thought, Iʼm going alone.
So there was a fight. Sometimes you invent gunpowder and you think SWEET but then they whip out JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF and BAM! Weʼre in hell.
How do you defeat your own son, born to YOUR OWN DAUGHTER! Freud would have a field day.
Did you know I can change shapes? BAM: halo, wings, grace. Looking sharp, looking the part. Time to go kick some Promethean ass.
What? The almighty knows everything? Asshole sent Gabriel - the mothafuckinʼ archangel himself - to warn Adam and his first lady.
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