#SuchTweetSorrow – Spectator competition winners summarise 12 literary greats – in a Tweet

In Competition 2800 you were invited to reconstitute a well-known work of literature as a tweet, i.e., text of up to 140 characters, including spaces.

A few years ago Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, two students from the University of Chicago, embarked on a mission to make the great works of literature more palatable to a 21st-century audience afflicted by an ever-dwindling attention span by recasting them in the vernacular of our time: the voice of Twitter.

Their endeavour prompted John Crace to have a go in the Guardian. Somewhat impressively, while Aciman and Emmett’s boiled-down classics were rendered in a series of tweets (up to 20), Crace managed it in one. Here is his take on Madame Bovary:

Bof I despise my mari’s provincialism. Give me glitter et amour. ‘Tu es too high maintenance,’ said Leon et Rodolphe. Alors I kill moi-meme.

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Competitor Charles Curran goes one better, not limiting himself to just one work but reducing Henry James’s entire oeuvre to a single, withering tweet:

Various vaguely unhappy upper crust characters discuss their minor problems and social pretensions at length.