The current Internet trend is… A novel from 1897?
Today, May 26, 2022, marks the 125th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the 19th
century classic is going viral thanks to Dracula Daily
[https://draculadaily.substack.com/about], a 21st century e-mail newsletter.
Dracula is an epistolary novel– That is, it’s written in the form of a series of letters,
newspaper clippings, and diary entries, each dated between May 3rd and November
10th (the span of time over which the novel takes place).
Dracula Daily sends out each part of the book on the actual dates matching those of the
letters, other documents, and clippings within the novel. The result? A huge
number of people across the English-speaking world are reading Dracula together, day
by day, and chatting about it on sites like Twitter and Tumblr. It’s turned social media
into one giant book group!
You can still join in (and catch up) on the Dracula Daily
newsletter homepage [https://draculadaily.substack.com].
Epistolary fiction has a long– and growing– tradition: the bulk of Frankenstein is
famously a letter-within-a-letter; The Color Purple begins as a series of letters Celie
writes to God; the story of This Is How You Lose The Time War is told through
messages that the nameless agents Red and Blue leave for each other to find, even as
they fight for opposing sides in the titular war.
Check out the display of epistolary novels up now at the library, or try one of these
books written, in part or entirely, as letters between the fictional characters whose story they tell:
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Contributed by: Erica LeBlang