Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories
- $13.95 PaperbackISBN: 978-1-933293-89-9
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These 50-word stories are based on “found” texts from mainstream news sources and other public sites. Jaffe sculpts them to reveal their inner core, all niceties stripped away. Now the true motives, fears and sins of our age are on display for all who care to see.
Amidst an internet-driven content boom, meaning has virtually disappeared. Anti-Twitter’s extreme brevity demonstrates by example that brief need not = dumbed-down. Though the stories describe a wide arc: high and pop culture, intimate and public, sordid and exalted, all subjects are equally laid bare by Jaffe’s incisive stratagems.
What They’re Saying About Anti-Twitter
“When it comes to less is more, Jaffe excels….he succinctly shows us the emperor has no clothes—which is no mean feat.”
—North County Times
“…while Jaffe precisely documents the info-culture, he subtly derails these tropes in arresting and insightful ways: a trickster figure stalks cyberspace, stealing identities, impersonating cancer victims, releasing the handbrakes on parked police cruisers, winning bets against the date of his own death. This survey of the depredation of contemporary life is more than the sum of its parts, suggesting that, while reality as officially constituted is untenable, the impassioned imagination can still find succor at the margins of experience.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction
“The ephemeral world-wide chatter of Twitter is here bathed in Harold Jaffe’s insidious acid, as another current language is accosted, insulted through example, and rendered absurd. Comic, at times frightening, pathetic, often ridiculous, these 150 Anti-Twitters stand against common currency of the form, become a cultural document of their own, no less than the hum of the word’s turnings. Once again Jaffe proves himself a master of subversion.”
—Toby Olson, author of Tampico
“In Anti-Twitter, Harold Jaffe works at the eruption point, where life in its raw fissiparity spews and proliferates story. Anger, astonishment, and outrage explode in bursts of savage irony. Jaffe excorcises the psychotic banal with a hot courage that is profoundly moral.”—Patricia Eakins, author of The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste
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