Great Book Titles

bendk

bendk

Grimscribe
What are some memorable book titles that have caught your attention? I am going to start with some funny ones.

I have been reading a lot of Robert M. Price lately. Some of his book titles crack me up.

Night of the Living Savior
The Amazing Colossal Apostle
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man


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A few older ones by the comedy writer, Jack Douglas. I pulled these off the shelves of a Goodwill bookstore probably twenty years ago because of the titles. I bought them because they we given blurbs by Jack Parr that said something like "The funniest book I've read in ten years." They are hilarious.

A Funny Thing Happened to Me on My Way to the Grave
My Brother was an Only Child


A few by Cynthia Heimel

If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?
When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me
But Enough About You
 
A few by Cynthia Heimel

If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?
When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me
But Enough About You[/QUOTE]

I really wanted those last two to just be one title: 'When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me, But Enough About You'.
Ah well, still funny.

Some I like, from the top of my head:

'I love you and there's nothing you can do about it' by Gerald Houarner.

'Which Moped with the chrome-plated handlebars at the back of the yard?' by Georges Perec
 
There are authors with a knack for inventive titling whose entire bibliographies could probably be dumped into this thread: Edward Gorey, Cornell Woolrich, R. A. Lafferty, D. F. Lewis, and Rhys Hughes come to mind.

Here is a perfectly-titled collection of interviews with Gorey:

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A few other titles that come to mind:
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone
Philip K. Dick's Confessions of a Crap Artist
John Clute's Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm
Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
James Huneker's Egoists: A Book of Supermen
Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics)

I don't think Kant was kidding.
 
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I plan in my lifetime to write exactly 1000 stories and no more and I have now reached number 722.
Every time I finish a new story I list it here:

Complete List of Short Stories

So you can see the titles of all my finished tales easily enough. The early tales tend to have fairly straightforward titles -- then I gradually developed the confidence to start inventing more unusual and elaborate titles. My favourite of my own titles so far is 'The Story With a Clever Title'.

I also have a list of titles for stories that I haven't yet written and a partial list of those can be be viewed here:

Titles for Unwritten Stories

When I made this list I had written none of the stories that had an unused title. The stories in blue are the ones I have written since.

My favourite title among my yet-to-be-written-tales is either 'Dynamiting the Honeybun' or 'My Rabbit's Shadow Looks Like a Hand'.

My apologies for the self-indulgence of this post!

But I do like unusual and elaborate titles.

I think that my favourite title of any novel by any writer ever is Half Past Human by T.J. Bass, which is about to be republished by Gollancz as a 'Masterwork'.
 






I should have known the topic of this thread would appeal to Rhys. He has some of the most inventive book and story titles out there. How can you not be tempted to at least read the description of a book with the title Worming the Harpy? I like these story titles too:

"Six Characters in Search of an Executioner" sounds like a Pirandello/Kafka story

"Oh, Whistle While You Work, and I'll Come to You, My Dwarf" Disney and M.R. James. Never saw that one coming... funny

(I like how you link the stories to the collection, Rhys. Many of the ones I am keen to read are in At the Molehills of Madness. I'll have to check it out.)



The reason I pulled my first Ligotti book from the shelf of Border's was the intriguing title, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The book description and reviews sold me.


Even from a purely marketing point of view, book titles are important. Unless I already know the author's work, the reason I pull a book from the shelf is usually the title. With the advent of e-commerce this has changed somewhat. Target marketing is the main reason I am directed to a book now or by the recommendations of people whose interests reflect my own. And, today, reputable reviews are all important. But I still like a good title.

Some recent ones that I have liked:

The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies by John Langan
Grimscribe's Puppets edited by Joseph S. Pulver

A couple of classics

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Some initially curious book titles become indelible after they are read.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll


Stories:

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka
"Something Beginning with 'L' " by Dino Buzzati
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
"The Frolic" by Thomas Ligotti
 
A few more titles that I like:

Meat Puppet Cabaret by Steve Beard
A Carnival of Buncombe Writings on politics. by H.L. Mencken
A Saturnalia of Bunk by H.L. Mencken (S.T. Joshi put this one together)


The first is a novel that doesn't seem like it would appeal to me. But I love the title.

The next two books are some of H.L. Mencken's best writings on politics. I've read most of both books. If you appreciate acerbic wit, you will enjoy these.
 
What book titles are bad, or rather indifferent? I assume those which are mundane and simple. But can it be that a great book, with a very simple title, processes the title in the collective consciousness so that it becomes experienced as brilliant title in all its simplicity because it is inseparable from the book itself?
 
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