'Tales on Tweet', published by HarperCollins India in a 'micro' size, has 98 micro stories.
When writer-illustrator Manoj Pandey began tagging his favourite authors like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Teju Cole seeking their feeds to his tweets, little did he know that their responses would be micro stories in themselves.
Pandey tweeted out a story. Then some more. And others began tweeting tales right back at him: Atwood and Kabir Bedi with death tales, Rushdie and Jeet Thayil with their dark humour, Cole meditating on loneliness, Shashi Tharoor on India, Prajwal Parajuly on literature... It was a literary moment of the sort: spontaneous, changeable, tangential and then, just like Twitter itself, surprisingly poignant in bursts and flashes.
But it was when these stories came together with Yuko Shimizu's phantasmagorical images that a book titled "Tales on Tweet" stepped off the scrollable vortex of a webpage and into the tactile intimacy of the reading experience.
These tales, not long than 140 characters, explore the dramatic potential of brevity through micro-narratives that build worlds, bring them down, laugh at death, mourn the moon.
"Tales on Tweet", published by HarperCollins India in a 'micro' size, has 98 micro stories.
Here's Rushdie's: "She died. He followed her into the underworld. She refused to return, preferring Hades. It was a long way to go to be dumped."
"Night again?/These blinking dots on our machines/ A tribe of orphaned fireflies/ 'I'm here'/'I'm here'/'I'm here'" tweets Cole.
Atwood's story goes on like this: "Red footprint, white footprint. An axe in the snow. But no body. Was a large bird involved? He scratched his head and made notes."
"Tales on Tweet", says Pandey, began with chimeric ambitions of inculcating a writing style of the ilk of Oscar Wilde, in the summer of 2011.
"By then, I was already tinkering with Twitter and using it as a byte-sized diary to gauge if what I wrote had any merit at all. My tales lacked details, characters and the general essence of a story. Rather, they were pithy sentences crafted to reveal one poignant detail. But, to me, the experiment carried the satisfaction of an epigram and all the ambiguity that is true of every kind of storytelling," he says.
Pandey was still exploring when one night, he wondered, why not ask someone who knew better, i.e., his handful of followers were friends and family.
"And who better than my favourite authors? So I started tagging Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Shashi Tharoor, Teju Cole and other literary geniuses. To my surprise, they wrote back, not with criticism, but with a story of their own. Maybe they saw some merit in what I wrote, or were simply drawn to the sheer fun of the idea," he says.
According to Pandey, he his not sure to this day what clicked.
"More crucially, their contributions brought clarity: these tales had an introduction, a body and a conclusion. In 140 characters."
Pandey calls this a defining moment, the beginning of a new form of storytelling.
Tharoor's tweet was on Mahatma Gandhi and Partition, "Gandhi saw the misery of partition and broke his vow of silence. He wept."
Thayil's contribution is: "So this is how it ends. You wake in moonlight to the sound of Chinese percussion: your voice saying her name, ah kang sha."
Among the other tweets is Shabnam Hashmi's which says, "They didn't know whether it was day or night, the torture continued; he wanted them to accept that they were terrorists."
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)