April Is the Cruelest Month; Plus, the Twitterati

I have a number of deadlines and finals of various sorts coming up this month, so my posting frequency/length might take a hit. I’ll be back to full strength (actually stronger, like a broken bone) in May.

Meanwhile, my favorite part of Twitter is following people I don’t know, authors (alive, faked, and dead) and fictional characters. There are a ton of them out there, but the vast majority of fictional accounts have been abandoned. I’m not sure what that means for the Twitter fad.

Here are some (active) literary Twitterers.

Characters

Nick Carraway – My favorite character on Twitter. Updated fairly regularly, mostly with lines from Gatsby, but they sound really poetic excerpted.

Harry Potter — There are a few of these, predictably. This one is quotes from the books; these two converse in character.

There’s no Humbert Humbert. For some reason, no one wants to pose as a pedophile on the Internet.

Real Authors

Nick Harkaway – Harkaway is the author of The Gone-Away World, which was great. In the digital publishing future, I’m not worried about any author who’s on Twitter. Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow will be OK, too.

Ben Okri – This Booker prize-winning author released a poem on Twitter. It was very short, which I suppose is appropriate.

R.N. Morris — Released a novel, The Gentle Axe, via his Twitter feed. Someone named Tim Letteney is also evidently releasing a story. I find trying to read any sort of narrative on Twitter unbearable. But, when someone starts releasing a Memento-like backwards story, I’m in.

Fake Authors

Shakespeare – There are a few. This one’s my favorite.

Thomas Pynchon – It’s fake, of course, and has only posted twice ever, but I just like the idea of following Thomas Pynchon on Twitter.

Ernest Hemingway –Papa tweets about once a week, with pithy, misanthropic one-liners.

Jack Kerouac — Snippets from On the Road. Like Carraway, pretty poetic excerpted.

Other

Not literary (or real) at all, but I get a kick out of following Dennis Hopper and Gary Busey. Mostly snippets of meaningless thoughts, but what on Twitter isn’t?

Know any other literitterers? Let us know in the comments.