Twitter and literature — should we file this combo under ‘never-the-twain-shall-meet’? After all, how could War and Peace possibly—

Aiyoh, turns out they’ve already met-lah, and given birth to twitterature (or twiction). Notable examples here.

Micro-serialization can entail either: (1) taking pre-existing novels and breaking them down into tweets, or (2) creating fresh fiction for Twitter. (Rick Moody of The Ice Storm fame recently published his short story via 153 tweets over 3 days.)

In twitterature, the interplay of three factors (number, frequency and quality of tweets) can cause a tech-savvy author to salivate, and a tech-averse one to palpitate (not in a good way). And yet these factors are familiar to anyone who’s tried to tell a story, regardless of medium – it’s about pacing; how to sustain; what to tell now and what to save for later; what to keep and what to edit (get used to 140 characters).

Other Twitter-enabled projects have gone beyond serialization. One project involved James Joyce’s Ulysses. The novel chronicles events of a single day, June 16, 1904. The Twitter project had over fifty characters from the book tweeting about what they were doing on that day, as per the novel.

So is twitterature here to stay? Does it fundamentally change the way fiction is written and read? For now, it’s enough to make you reconsider the nature of fiction, and maybe even accept that the next War and Peace will come to us one tweet at a time.

“Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family.” — First line of Tolstoy’s epic novel (93 characters, with spaces).

We love our little Renyi/slave/intern and are very proud of her!

As she comes home from work

5:45pm – on the Piccadilly line, she hides
behind a day-old slice of the Metro,
lets fall
her city coat, grey and impersonal as concrete;
the starched Egyptian cotton shirt,
beaten free of sunlight;
the sober charcoal of her skirt –
Italian wool – stapled to her paper doll frame,
stockings of last-gasp cigarette smoke
drifting around her feet.
She stands in her chemise,
a scrap of cloud snagged on a skyscraper
bare in the carriage.
Between sudoku and crosswords
no one notices
this striptease
to the strains of Schubert and The Strokes
bleeding from anonymous ears.

Ghosts

At dawn, I heard two sounds
I would never hear again. First, the sonorous bark
of a dog that died in April

woke me. And then, I swear
your sleep-soaked murmur buried itself
in my spine, the way it would when I stole

your share of the blankets. Repentant,
I turned to cast it over
unslept-in sheets and vacant air.

Postcard from a Hot Country

Away from you, I have lost count of the days.
I know I write this in a summer month, with news
from a land you never used to think of.

There are lizards in my bathroom again, the roads
swarm with bad drivers, and the heat is heavy,
a duvet refusing to lift until evening turns my skin

golden against the sky’s deep blue.
I fall back in love with my city at this hour,
And so, I think, would you, if you learnt how luck

is a golden oriole swooping past the window,
or if you smelt promise in the first blooms
of a Rangoon Creeper. The rain’s soft hiss

on outstretched jungle leaves will make you cry
in your dreams. If you ever visit, I’ll teach you
to eat dumplings with eighteen petal folds,

to bite it with care so the soup does not spill out
and scald your lips – fierce as the kiss
pressed to this sixty-sen postcard.