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Roxane Gay on the Joys and Perils of Twitter
When we debate modernity, we tend to engage in all-or-nothing propositions. Technology is either wholly good or wholly destructive. Somewhere between these two extremes is where we will find the truth. Our rock-star essays editor Roxane Gay has an essay titled…
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Atwood/Munro Selfies Justify Twitter’s Existence
Let’s all take a moment to appreciate that Twitter has realized its true purpose, achieving an all-time high point in social-media history—and, indeed, in human civilization—with one stunning development: Margaret Atwood’s adorable selfies of her and Alice Munro celebrating Munro’s…
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Let’s Face It: Oscar Wilde Would Have Ruled Twitter
“@MargaretAtwood @JoyceCarolOates @nycnovel @NathanEnglander @Shteyngart and I are fine with Twitter,” Salman Rushdie recently declared to the anti-social-media Jonathan Franzen. If famous authors of the past had been fine with Twitter, what would they have tweeted? Bookish has some ideas.
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The gift of not responding
There’s a big secret Twitter doesn’t want you to know, as Choire Sicha writes in a recent article on The Awl. “You don’t have to respond to anyone on Twitter. Ever.” Sicha lists a number of reasons one might choose…
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Less Face, More Book for These Reclusive Authors
Though it can be hard to remember between tweeting at your favorite writer and joining a Facebook event page for a reading, there was a time when many authors led reclusive lives with minimal self-promotion. Bookish has rounded up a…
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Twitter as Literary Device?
As Twitter continues to be met with the warm (and arguably unlikely) embrace of writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Jennifer Egan (read the story she wrote for last year’s fiction issue of The New Yorker in its original serialized tweet form…
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What Artist is the Focus of Your Unconditional Affection?
A few days ago, writer Teju Cole posed a question to his Twitter followers: “One living writer or musician as the focus of your unconditional affection. Someone all of whose work you buy. Who would that be for you?” The…
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Lydia Davis and Twitter: A Match Made in Heaven
For some writers, Twitter isn’t a newfangled distraction but rather an extension of the art they’ve been making all along. Lydia Davis, whose stories often span only a few sentences, plans to give the microblogging platform a try as a…
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A Twitter Bot That Knows Its Poetry
Located, according to its profile, in Stratford-upon-Internet, Twitter account @pentametron finds random users’ everyday tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter and retweets them as rhyming couplets. It’s unclear whether the account is a bot or a human with computer assistance…
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On Buying Your Friends
The San Francisco Bay Guardian‘s current cover story is about the culture surrounding Twitter bots that artificially inflate your follower count: who buys them, why, and where you can buy them yourself. The story’s author, Caitlin Donohue, picked up a few…
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Twitter Fiction Festival A Success
Previously, we blogged about Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt’s Twitter mystery. As it turns out, Rumpus contributor and interviewee Scott Hutchins wrote one as well, a San Francisco noir called “The Nanny.” They were both part of the five-day Twitter Fiction Festival,…
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Tweet to Death
Check out Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt’s Brooklyn Twitter mystery. You have until the end of today to help decide if the death in question was a “#suicide, #homicide, or an #accident?”