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The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel [Paperback]

Dan Sinker , Biz Stone
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)

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Book Description

September 13, 2011
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.


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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.


Amazon Exclusive: Adam Mansbach Reviews The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel

Adam Mansbach is the best-selling author of Go the F**k to Sleep.

Dan Sinker started on a whim with one-liners, capitalizing on a caricature of Rahm Emanuel and utilizing an encyclopedic knowledge of local Chicago and national politics. But as the account started amassing followers, Sinker found characters and a story. He followed the real-time events of the real Rahm, but he added a duck and an intern with MacGyver-like skills. Tweets were strung together in quick succession. They became more like paragraphs. Followers were responding as the tweets were sent. Dan was reading the responses and getting ideas from them, picking up on mistakes he'd made and finding ways to correct those mistakes later in his narrative. Dan Sinker was writing a long-form story, and turning it into a spectators' sport.

This may not be the future of the novel, but it is a future of the novel. This is how some literature will be written, and I, for one, am fascinated to see how it's going to work. We have the blueprint in The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel, which is presented in full tweet glory along with entertaining annotations and topped off with Dan Sinker's personal story of creating and experiencing the phenomenon that transformed an anonymous prankster who hoped he'd never be unmasked into a folk hero who appeared in every major publication across the country and on The Colbert Report.

From making snow angels on the frozen ice of Lake Michigan, to dancing with the ghost of Curtis Mayfield, to its emotional climax at the edge of space-time itself, the profane tweets of @MayorEmanuel offer a hilariously surreal--and, at times oddly moving--look at the historic election, a larger-than-life persona, redemption, sacrifice, and the lasting bonds of both friendship and civic pride. --Adam Mansbach


Review

"David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Del Close and Charna Halpern, Studs Terkel and Lenny Bruce: Meet Dan Sinker. He's one of yours, and one of ours." --Chicago Tribune

"The success of Sinker's uproarious Tweeted novel affirms the fact that we are hardwired for stories, however they are delivered. In all, a many-faceted, bravura performance." --Booklist

"Indeed, @MayorEmanuel may be the first truly great piece of digital literary work." --The Economist

"There were many storylines in Rahm Emanuel's romp to the Chicago mayor's office . . . the performance and identify of @MayorEmanuel, a fake Twitter account, captured the imagination nearly as much as the real politics. . . . The genius behind @MayorEmanuel is Dan Sinker, who has a heart made out of Chicago and balls of punk rock."--The Atlantic

“My sentiments exactly.” —Rahm Emanuel

"The first truly great piece of literature to be produced using this micromedium that's rapidly transforming communication in the digital age."--Wired

"Sinker's work is a knowing, cynical, sentimental and hilarious love song to Chicago, its history, its politics, its artists and its people."--Chicago Tribune

"The print book could easily have been a gimmick, or just a hard copy for the files. But supplemented by annotations that explain back-stories, the book is more capacious than the feed. The Twitter time-stamps are still there, but readers are not interrupted by other tweets, so the book is more engrossing."--The Economist

Product Details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Scribner; Original edition (September 13, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1451655142
  • ISBN-13: 978-1451655148
  • Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 5 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #688,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel Sinker is the head of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. A writer, educator, designer, and programmer, he is the author of the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed, the founder and developer of the local election tracker ChicagoMayoralScorecard.com and the mobile storytelling project CellStories.net.

From 1994-2007, Sinker was the founder and Editor In Chief of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet, the editor of the book We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews, as well as the founder and editor of a line of fiercely independent books, Punk Planet Books, an imprint of Akashic Books.

Sinker was a 2007-08 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where he studied the impact of mobile technologies on traditional publishing model. He received his BFA in video production and new media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.

Sinker is is also a graphic designer whose design for Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned was named one of the 25 "new classic" book covers of the last 25 years by Entertainment Weekly. He also occasionally blogs about media for the Huffington Post.

He lives in Chicago with his wife and son.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars The funniest book of the year, possibly of all time September 7, 2011
Format:Paperback
@MayorEmanuel was, without exception, the best thing I have ever encountered on the internet. I profoundly mourn the fact that the Mayor is no longer telling his story. So it was great to read the entire thing from the start, with commentary. It is DEFINITELY worth reading in this format. You will love this book, and if you don't, then I'm really not sure what to say to you, sir.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Epic indeed. September 8, 2011
Format:Paperback
This is a must read if you have ever lived in Chicago, want to experience a dusting of the literary potential of social media, or simply enjoy a good laugh.

Beyond the hilarity that comes from moronic liberal doses of unnecessary vulgarity, Sinker draws on a lifetime of Chicago living. Local politicians, local joints, local heros, even dibs chairs, the twitter feed of @mayoremanuel brought life and fun into Chicago politics. While the twitter feed is still up and available to view for free, Sinker breaks down tweets with time stamps, daily feeds and topical stories. He interjects the story behind the story, bringing new life and depth the imaginary characters created.

Rahm Emanuel is known for his spouts of profanity, used brilliantly by Sinker as a literary tool. You can just imagine the hilarity of Rahm walking into a room and saying such horrible things to cabinet members, fellow running mates and others in Chicago politics. His imaginary characters like Quaxelrod, the duck with a mustache fashioned in the likeness of David Axelrod, provide further comic relief and fun with the political systems of power our government thrives on.

The nearly 2,000 tweets in real time were so full of suspense, a highlight for months as my wife and I would guffaw at the sheer audacity and humor in a drawn out roast of Chicago's future mayor. As we went to the polls and watched the imaginary twitter story whip up to a frenzied climax it brought political theater to life, even bringing a greater depth of understanding to our views of Chicago politics. The brilliance of the story may simply lie in Sinker's appreciation of literature and story telling, his sheer ability to have ended the feed as he did even as its popularity soared with breakneck speed.
... Read more ›
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A F**king Great Story September 18, 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Summary: Laughed out loud. A lot. You should read it--it's a great story. :-)

Details: Since Dan wrote a lot of these tweets on his commute, I decided to read the entire book on my commute on Chicagos "L" train. This made it just that much better as I got a lot of funny looks when I'd bust out laughing on a packed train. And yes, I even fired up Journey's "Separate Ways" on my iPod as instructed. And I've still got it stuck in my head, days later.

This book is basically the @MayorEmanuel tweet stream from beginning to end, but annotated to explain many of the references as well as what was happening in the election at the time, plus a few other bits explaining how Dan's identity was discovered (but kept secret!), and how +Alexis Madrigal talked Dan into letting Alexis "Out" Dan as @MayorEmanuel.

Having followed @MayorEmanuel during the election and read (and re-read) the Twitter stream as it was being written, it was very enjoyable to re-absorb it all in one go, and the annotations even enlightened me on a few of the current events that took place while I was out of town. Even though this all took place a scant seven months ago, it was still exciting to relive the story.

I could go on and on and on about the book, but suffice to say that it really *is* a love story to Chicago: touching on the city's heritage, politics, history, and not a few of its characters that make this city great. And it's all told on the crazy journey of a mayoral candidate who is profoundly pissed off that he has to go through this joke of an election that he couldn't possibly lose against a veritable circus of opponents: it's a modern-day nerd's Confederacy of Dunces set in Chicago.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars What the description doesn't tell you November 4, 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm not going to bother reviewing content because anyone smart enough to be looking at this page knows how great the story is. I do want to cover what the description didn't though:

- There's an index. Just. . .think about that for a second. Sinker indexes the tweets. Amazing.

- Sinker took the @replies out. I get that @MayorEmanuel mouthing off at some idiot or another is not part of the overall story, but those tweets were still part of what made @MayorEmanuel and were, I thought, an essential part of the character.

- If you were following the twitter when it was live, the static-ness of the text might be a bit weird for you. It took me a while to adjust to the presentation of tweets. They're also organized by storyline/date, which took some getting used to.

- There is commentary and annotations. It's great! I don't live and never have lived in Chicago, so Sinker's notes on the Chicago in-jokes were really helpful. I also enjoyed his stories behind some of the tweets and plotlines. HOWEVER. I'd have preferred footnotes. His commentary is placed directly underneath the tweet they refer to, which really breaks up the flow of the text/tweets. Anyone who followed @MayorEmanuel knows that when @MayorEmanuel gets going, he REALLY gets going. Much of the humor in his tweet rants is him just going off about someone or something for several tweets. Having commentary placed between tweets cut into the hilarity and took me out of the experience of that scene. As helpful and interesting as they are, I think that first time readers would suffer from having the placed commentary where it is. (Not that this will stop me from lending it out, no. Not at all.)

- There are long notes ('The Epilogue') at the end. These are legit.
... Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars F*&#*ing Awesome
This is a great read -- maybe even better than reading the blog in real time. That said, now I can't seem to stop swearing. Thanks Rahm, I mean Dan.
Published 1 month ago by Robert J. Lemke
2.0 out of 5 stars Cover is on backwards
Five stars for content, but taking three off for not mentioning that the cover is on backwards. Hilarious **** overall, but the production defect should have been disclosed in the... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Ives
5.0 out of 5 stars Great for a Quick Laugh
I've read through the entire twitter feed before but this book overs and easier and more complete way to read this story. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Mark Abbott
5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious
This book left me rolling in laughter. I read this during a long car trip and laughed the entire time. I wish the @MayorEmanuel story was still continuing. Read more
Published 6 months ago by ThunderRoad
5.0 out of 5 stars I loved it!
This book is a Twitter feed that aggregates into an entertaining epic poem.

It's journalist/web-geek Sinker's unrestrained tweets under the fictional persona of Rahm... Read more
Published 7 months ago by litaddiction
5.0 out of 5 stars hilarious
I picked up the book on a recommendation of a friend from Chicago. For anyone remotely interested in politics and who has an idea of Rahm Emanuel, these tweets sound very... Read more
Published 11 months ago by A. Hall
5.0 out of 5 stars Seriously, the funniest book about political campaigning
I have given this book as a gift to lots of friends who aren't political junkies, but who can appreciate just how hard it is to deliver a funny, profane and insightful comment in... Read more
Published 14 months ago by P. Smith
3.0 out of 5 stars F Bombs Galore - And Totally Worth It
When @MayorEmanuel was actively tweeting, I was a little obsessed, because:

- It captured a pretty unique point in Chicago history
- I loved all the Chicago... Read more
Published 17 months ago by Postscript
5.0 out of 5 stars The height of twitter
This was an very enjoyable book. As a Chicago native, it really was a fun read but I think anyone familiar with Emanuel will enjoy it quite a bit. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Michael
5.0 out of 5 stars A really motherf***ing great read!
Dan Sinker has a knack for starting something on a lark and then eventually using it to redefine it's medium. Read more
Published 20 months ago by S. Brown
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