Tweet collection: David Mitchell's Slade House is out Oct 27, just a few days before the novel's events come to a close.
When Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell began tweeting a short story in 2014, he was one of a small number of writers to use social media as a medium for fiction. As that story heads to print this month, new literature experiments are taking the concept to new places.
Mitchell's Slade House began life as a collection of 280 tweets collectively called The Right Sort and launched on July 14, 2014. It went on to become the first in a five-part novel called Slade House, due for international release on Oct 27.
That date has particular significance, as Slade House tells a tale that begins in 1979 and reaches its conclusion on Oct 31, 2015.
The book will be of interest to fans of Mitchell's novel The Bone Clocks, as it occupies the same universe as the 2014 best-seller. In the follow-up, called a "reality-warping new version of the haunted house story," the brother-and-sister residents of a mysterious house extend an invitation to one "different or lonely" person once every nine years.
For a sneak peek, The Right Sort can be read in its original form at twitter.com.
While Twitter has now become a relatively common platform for literature, with an annual Fiction Festival that has counted Margaret Atwood and Alexander McCall Smith among its participants, new projects are taking things a step further, and the release of The Slade House comes the same month as two innovative projects combining fiction and modern technology.
Joshua Cohen, the author of the metafiction novel Book of Numbers, chose Google Docs as the medium for his serial novel PCKWCK, a five-day project that began Oct 12. In his reinterpretation of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, visitors were able to watch Cohen write in real time, even offering direct feedback that could change the novel's outcome.
On Instagram, photographer and writer Rachel Hulin is behind Hey Harry Hey Matilda, a novel that is currently unfolding in a series of captioned posts that track the correspondence of 30-something twins Matilda and Harry Goodman. Interested readers can follow along on the social network or subscribe to receive the novel in weekly installments. — AFP Relaxnews
Limited time offer:
Just RM5 per month.
