Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘titles’

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"The Call of the Domestic" and other Less Interesting Books

by Celeste Ng

For the past few weeks, book-loving Twitterers have been amusing themselves by coming up with Less Interesting Books. Here are a few of my favorites: The Devil Wears Hush Puppies (@TheJaneChannel) To Give a Mockingbird a Stern Talking To (@andrewvanorden) A Farewell to Arms: Coping with Amputation (@waltonky) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Glendale Galleria (@peteFweiss) The At-Times-Slightly-Unpleasant-But-Altogether-Perfectly-Manageable Lightness of Being (@mattmclowry) A Couple of Years of Solitude (@joefi) The great thing about hashtags like this is people keep coming up with more. Search for the #lessinterestingbooks tag on Twitter for more, and tell us yours in the comments. Via. […]


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Better Book Titles

by Celeste Ng

Titles are many a writer’s Achilles heel. Even the greats had trouble—F. Scott Fitzgerald, for one, originally considered several alternative titles for The Great Gatsby, including Trimalchio in West Egg and The High-Bouncing Lover. (Yikes.) Each weekday, Dan Wilbur’s blog Better Book Titles features one book, retitled more honestly—and hilariously. Some of my favorites: Cynical? A little, but many of the Better Book Titles strike right to the heart of a book’s theme. Like this one: Visit the blog here, and don’t miss the archive.


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Titles to Avoid

by Celeste Ng

Trimalchio in West Egg. A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. Catch-18. Even the greats struggle with their titles sometimes, toying with titles like these before settling on The Great Gatsby, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Catch-22. So what makes a good title–or a bad one? Author and teacher Eric Puchner has some thoughts in GlimmerTrain’s latest bulletin: So, based on years of teaching, I’ve compiled the following list of types of TITLES TO AVOID. (Note: some of the examples below are real titles, from good stories.) The Purely Descriptive: “One Early Morning in Topeka at Dawn” The Lofty Abstraction, AKA the Bad […]



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