Twitterature arrives on Australian bookshelves

The brainchild of two University of Chicago students has hit bookshelves in Australia to bring you the likes of Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Kafka, Orwell and more in 140 characters or less.

The likelihood of this making a whole lot of people vomit, spit chips, choke on their baguettes, smash screens or generally engage in some other form of computer-destroying activity is quite high. The reason being that Twitterature, unlike other Twitter incursions into high culture, is making its way into the real world — published in proper book form, and by Penguin no less.

Twitterature's premise is simple; take a big sample of the greats of Western literature, give the characters preposterous screen names, and re-tell the story of each book in no more than twenty tweets.

At a time when Philip Roth is declaring that novel-reading will be no more than a cult activity within the next twenty five years, this will probably come as little consolation to those who would prefer to see literature given higher station as above all "those things" — things like Twitter — in a world that apparently moves too quickly now for anyone to enjoy a book, let alone allow one to expand their consciousness.

To those who feel this way, we at The Blob would like to lodge an objection. There'd be no quicker way to make good on Roth's apocalyptic prophecy for the novel than to cloister literature any further. By being so po-faced and humourless about it, and allowing the character of eternal works to diminish by sentimentalising them as little more than dusty classics incapable of withstanding a well-timed, deeply affectionate skewering by two precocious nineteen-year-old English majors, that surely would see the art of words wither under the weight of our technomanic world.

Twitterature is a celebration of the novel. It is funny and razor sharp — from what we've seen so far — and by no measure should the collection itself be taken seriously. But that doesn't mean there's nothing we can take away from it. The full catalogue of works comprises an indispensable reading list for anyone, especially those coming of age in the Facebook era. And anything that gets someone to pick up a Dorian Gray, a Gatsby, The Crying of Lot 49, Crime and Punishment, or even to take a fresh look at their high school copy of Hamlet is a good thing.