Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin's Selected Tweets (Short Drive/Long Flight Books) is a compendium of tweets written over the course of ten years, sometimes under their own names, sometimes using assumed names. Mira and Tao both approach tweets as a viable potential literary form. Often dark and despairing, but also bitingly funny, Mira sees tweets as being as essential to literature as haiku. For his part, Tao assigns equal value to both tweets and his fiction writing. Ultimately, we rediscover that even as literary platforms change, these brief forms of expression are not new. Aphorisms, fables and epigrams are short forms that have had a place in our literatures for centuries. Tweets might just be a continuation of these short forms, not a disruption.
Read an excerpt from Selected Tweets.
Photo: Alex Pieros