WHAT A TWIT

THE TWEETS OF TREY FUNSTON - Vol 1

RunningForCover Press

236pp $17.95

In our modern age, nothing is more interesting and important as the generation of authors who have found a vast new audience thanks to the social networking site, Twitter. Limited to 140 characters per post, millions of talented writers are carving out careers, constantly updating friends, family and a fascinated general public on their every thought and deed. Anxious to keep up with the cutting edge of technology, RunningForCover Press has taken the bold step of publishing -in book form, no less-  one of the most talented and prolific of the Twitter-ers, Trey Funston, and it looks as if the risk has paid off.

Funston, a systems analyst with a major company in New York, has entertained the public for months with his energetic and informative 'Tweets', and if this first volume of his work is any indication of his talent, we can look forward to many more months of utterings from the self-styled 'Bard Of Broadway'. Funston's maximum use of the 140-character limit is almost Proustian in it's attention to detail, and positively Joycean in it's playful and incisive use of language. There are simply too many fine examples to cite, but among them are such gems as "I'm running late for work, so I think I'll start running" and "I saw Rich, the guy from I.T. buying a newspaper this morning. What's up with that?" Funston not only tweets continuously about his own fascinating life, but comments on other Tweeters he follows in his spare time. After reading a tweet from the Today show's Matt Lauer, Funston tweets "Really interesting comment by Lauer, you should read it", and catching up with the postings of Rosie O'Donnell, he wittily tweets "That Rosie, you'll never guess what she said only 15 minutes ago, what a riot!"

Funston is so confident in his tweets that he uses no abbreviations, text shorthand or misspellings, and always uses proper punctuation - even when edging perilously close to the 140 character limit. As he says in his self-penned forward to the book, "I know the limits and I get the most out of them".  The publishers have given us a hint that they expect the book will be a best-seller by confidently sub-titling it 'Volume 1', so it's hoped that it won't be too long before we can get Volume 2 and continue to re-live the tweets of this budding genius.

Available in hardcover, softcover, Kindle and  CD (read by James Earl Jones).