Take another of my fish book’s adventures. And even weirder is the way a book can tumble through the electronic ether, following a fate the author never could have imagined. Insulting one publicly was unthinkable, unless you were another writer, like, say, Norman Mailer, in which case you’d just punch the other writer in the face.īut now public discourse is, um, different, and as a writer, you are just as likely to be asked to perform an act of fellatio as you are to list your literary influences.

Writers had something of a lofty, untouchable glow. But as a high-school kid, I never would have dreamed of writing to one of the authors whose work we’d been assigned to read. Sure, there were probably trolls at the back of the class at the School of Athens scribbling papyrus wedgie threats to Plato. But this spring, with Twitter seeming to become even more of an adolescent stew, I found myself reflecting again about what happens to a book when it travels to the strange land of social media. I posted online about all this a while back and let the incident slip from my mind. “Hey I had a little fan mail for you”: a picture of my book’s cover with a Post-it note reading, “suck my dick.” This person went on to tweet, “Everyone follow me I don’t suck fish dick.” She assured me that the student’s Twitter account had been suspended and that disciplinary action had been taken.Ī little later, a tweet came in from someone going by 4fishisgay. The tweets from the high-school class abruptly ceased. “I have the free speech right to say whatever I want about your book and my opinion on it,” he replied. I wrote that I would be telling the teacher about this one. In another tweet, he used a homophobic slur. Because a whole classful of book purchases makes my publisher happy, I dutifully tweeted back.īut then the bad tweets who the fuck wants to read about fish lol” She’d had the clever idea that it might be fun for her students to “engage” with a real author online. O ne spring morning, high-school students started tweeting at when is the last time you have eaten Bluefin Tuna?”Īnother wanted to know about the “most unique places you have been on your studies/fishing trips.” A science teacher had assigned my book Four Fish and found me on social media.

Four fish greenberg