The Novelist Whose Twitter Feed Is a Work of Art ?

Rabih Alameddine has become a kind of online cult celebrity due to the strange and mesmerizing threads on his Twitter account.

The Novelist Whose Twitter Feed Is a Work of Art

When Rabih Alameddine is struggling with his writing, he takes to Twitter, and posts pictures of works of art.

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The novelist Rabih Alameddine populates his Twitter feed with works of art, like this 1924 piece by El Lissitzky, “Proun 93. Floating Spiral.”PHOTOGRAPH BY FINE ART IMAGES / HERITAGE / GETTY



While writing “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison was said to have picked up his trumpet when he hit a snag so that he could sound out his thoughts in music and then right himself on the page. When the fifty-seven-year-old Lebanese-American novelist Rabih Alameddine is struggling, he takes to Twitter, and posts pictures of works of art. Signs of his inching progress appear in the images he shares while in the creative throes. “The more beautiful the image, the more frustrated I am in my writing,” he told me recently. “If I post a whole series of Matisse, then I’ve reached a dead end. If I do Monet, I’m going nowhere.”