Twitterature: Two US university students have summarised the stories of some of the world’s greatest literary works in to Twitter messages

  Two students in the US have summarised the stories of some of the world’s greatest literature in to 140-character messages using the popular micro-blogging site Twitter.

Emmett Rensin, an English and philosophy student at the University of Chicago, and friend Alexander Aciman, who is studying comparative literature, condensed the plot lines in Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter, soon to be published by Penguin.

According to the Telegraph, the book reads Dante’s Inferno as: “I’m having a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Should a bought my iPhone.” Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is trimmed to: “PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me.” Homer’s The Odyssey, and the work of Milton, Kafka and Shakespeare also feature in the tome.

Rensin said: “It’s funny if you’ve read the books.” Aciman added: “There were some lines in the book where we’re sitting on a couch and we’re writing it, and we’d both laugh and say ‘there’s no way they’re going to let us write that’.

“Some people think it’s funny and some people think it’s disrespectful. “I’m not going to say it’s high art. There is some value to it, I feel, aside from the fact we’re making available the idea behind great works of art.”