The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel

Primary Colors for the social media era, the wildly profane, viral phenomenon that resulted from a fake Twitter account deftly satirizing Rahm Emanuel is the first significant Twitter epic in today’s digital age. 

With web sensations such as Stuff White People Like and Sh*t My Dad Says making the leap from the Internet to the bestseller lists, it’s no surprise that this unique and hilarious first-person account of Rahm Emanuel’s fake mayoral campaign via Twitter has already been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, The Colbert Report, and is still an unfolding story. Now, fans can read the entire six months of collected tweets of @MayorEmanuel with commentary and annotations from creator Dan Sinker.

     When rumors circulated that Rahm Emanuel would enter the Chicago mayor’s race, suddenly the “real” Rahm became overshadowed by a decidedly different Rahm, @MayorEmanuel. Via Twitter, this fake Rahm spun a faux-insider’s story unlike any other—in real time. Garnering a passionate following on Twitter and hailed by the press, @MayorEmanuel’s journey is an entertaining, modern-day anti-hero's quest as he travels a surrealistic Chicago landscape, picking up friends along the way, including advisor David Axelrod, Carl the Intern (a high-school-aged MacGyver), a puppy named Hambone, and a duck named Quaxelrod, to name a few.

     Both a surprisingly literary romp as well as an inside peek into an historic mayoral race, The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel is a bold and exciting foray into a new form of participatory, real-time storytelling.

Dan Sinker is an assistant professor at Columbia College in Chicago. A writer, designer, and programmer, Sinker is the founder and developer of the local election tracker ChicagoMayoralScorecard.com, the mobile storytelling project CellStories.net, and the founding editor of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet, which published from 1994 to 2007. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son.