The Lesser Known Relatives of Classic Novels

I fell about laughing on Friday when I noticed the twitter hash-tag #lesserbooks via Eeleen Lee's tweets.  Alison Flood in The Guardian takes up the story of the novels that didn't quite make the shelves - among them such classics as Captain Corelli's Ukelele, To Slightly Maim a Mockingbird, The The Not-as-shite-as-you-think Gatsby, Zen and the Art of Unicycle Maintenance.

Eeleen's tweets were very funny.  Here are the titles she coined :

The Mediocre Gatsby
The Rough Sketch of Dorian Gray
The Raisins of Irritation
Infatuation In the Time of H1N1
Charlie and the Carob Factory
The Faucet-Head
A Wind-up Tangerine
Perdido Street Railway Platform
The Damien Hirst Code
A Farewell to Cuticles
The Detached-Retina Assassin
The Korma Sutra
Skype With the Vampire
The Liger, the Wiccan and the Laundry Basket

Twitter Revenge

Your book got a lousy review? Twitter seems to be the tool of choice for hitting back at the reviewer.

Alice Hoffman called Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman a moron for this review (which actually contains plenty that isn't negative!) and demanded to know :

How do some people get to review books? Now any idiot can be a critic.

She then tweeted (is there such a verb, or should that be twote?) Silman's phone number and email address to the world asking her followers to :

... tell her what u think of snarky critics ...

This bordered on harrassment writes Kate Ward at Entertainment Weekly who adds a rather amusing aside :

Thanks to a tipster, we stumbled upon an interview with author Richard Ford, in which he admits to putting a gunshot hole through a book written by a writer who panned one of his books. The reviewer? Alice Hoffman.

UCL's professor of English, John Mullan in The Guardian reckons we can expect more authors sounding off on Twitter because it is a safety valve, but reckons that the best response to a less than good review is a dignified silence. This blogger agrees.

Postscript :

Philip Hensher writes in The Telegraph :

The danger of the internet ... is not so much that anyone can express their opinion – if that is true, everyone is also free to ignore that opinion – but the way it sets a casual statement in stone, and propagates it freely. An author's response to a bad review may be immediate, but the heartfelt expression of your emotional pain is there for as long as anyone chooses to preserve it. ... A comment in conversation, a bad-tempered grunt over breakfast, disappears into thin air; five foul-tempered sentences responding to a blog stay there indefinitely. In former times, what preserved your writing was what came out in hard covers.

All of a Twitter in 140 Characters!

Yang-May Ooi is certainly quickly at home with new technology. While she was in Malaysia, she phone blogged her adventures. And now she's all of a twitter over a (relatively) new mini-blogging and messaging facility called ... Twitter.

Excited by the possibilities of this new medium, she is asking readers if they can be creative in 140 characters (like in an SMS message) to produce Twitter mini-flash fiction or digital haiku:

What I would really love to see are Twitterers who can write something interesting or thought-provoking in 140 characters so that I can have something worthwhile to read on my mobile phone - when I'm on the bus or hanging around waiting in between real-life events. So here's a challenge to all you flash fiction writers and haiku poets, can you Twitter interestingly, uniquely, fascinatingly, challengingly to entertain, bewitch, bedazzle and enthrall the masses on their phones? Let me know if you have such a Twitter account and I'll feature you on Fusion View!

She reckons that my local readership should go for this as Malaysians have short attention spans ... (now where was I?) ... and are joined at the hip to their handphones ... (just excuse me while I answer that ...)

140 characters! We thought we were pushing the limits with six-word stories, the other day!

And speaking of short short stories, here's one you must read - Julio Cortazar's post-modern piece A Continuity of Parks. Just coffee break length and magic.