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Steven Soderbergh tweets a thrilling crime novella

Steven Soderbergh tweets a thrilling crime novella

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Director Steven Soderbergh may have finally given up filmmaking for good, but he's still keeping busy. Just a day after his speech criticizing the gatekeepers of cinema, the director took to Twitter to release a new narrative to all his followers — but he hasn't relapsed into filmmaking. It's a novella, told in tweets.

Titled Glue, the novella is a crime story written in sharp, terse sentences with occasional photographs interspersed. Soderbergh is telling the story in second person, with each chapter ranging from just a couple tweets to over a dozen. He began the constant stream of tweets on Sunday and announced yesterday that he's made it eleven chapters in.

Soderbergh isn't the first to take short-form storytelling to Twitter. Last May, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan published an 8,500-word science-fiction story on Twitter, ahead of its printing in The New Yorker. Both of these writers appear to have created their work with Twitter in mind, adapting their stories' structures to better fit the short-form medium. Whether it makes for great art is another question, but the format is clearly attracting great artists. And the best part? No gatekeepers.

You can follow along with the novella on @bitchuation, which remains unverified by Twitter but has been acknowledged by Soderbergh as his own account.