Selected Tweets

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0989695026 ISBN 13: 9780989695022

Publisher: Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2015

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Fiction. Poetry. SELECTED TWEETS by Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin, dating from 2008 to 2014, as well as extras such as illustrations of each other's tweets, short stories, essays, and a long poem.

SHEILA HETI: How do you imagine people read Twitter?

TAO LIN: On their phones I think mostly. I think I've read the most Twitter while laying in bed or on my back, or just laying in places, like in parks or in airports. Maybe not the most, but a lot. I've dropped my phone on my face many times. I think other people must too, but I rarely hear about this.

SHEILA HETI: What do you think about before you tweet? You once told me that you tweet what makes you feel uncomfortable. So which tweets do you reject, which do you accept?

MIRA GONZALEZ: I wouldn't necessarily say that I tweet what makes me feel uncomfortable, I think it's more that I feel comfortable tweeting things that I would never feel comfortable saying in a real life conversation, or even in other places on the internet. For reasons that I don't fully understand, Twitter is a place where I don't feel ashamed to say my most shameful thoughts...

(From "What Would Twitter Do," Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez interviewed by Sheila Heti)

Review:

"Selected Tweets features a selection of bleak, depressed, disturbing, funny, and personal tweets that create a fragmented narrative and show how Twitter can serve as a platform for art, storytelling, and connection."
--Emma Kolchin-Miller, Coliumbia Daily Spectator

"Selected Tweets announces it will not be a collection of tweets in the conventional sense by purposefully being devoid of @-headed shout-outs and retweets; likewise, nearly every trace of an ongoing conversation has been scraped away. The result is a stripped-down chronological window into thought-making and recording that takes place over a combined ten years under nine different Twitter handles owned by the authors. [...] Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez have elevated the medium into an art form with the power to transmit authentic observations."
--Andrea Longini, Electric Literature

"Lin's half is full of his typical neutrals and monotones, while Gonzalez's is littered with objects being stuffed up her vagina and musings on Werner Herzog. The tweets are scattered, disconnected, but made cohesive through the authors' perpetual discontent combined with their efforts to connect to others, and their spirals through drug abuse when this fails."
--Elaina Randsford, Flaunt

"Beautifully organized [...] surprisingly interesting [...] It works very beautifully about psychic distress and contemporary nausea--it's a really lovely book, and it's the way that we think and write now."
--David Shields, author of Reality Hunger and other books