Within literature’s greatest books lives another library of books, unpublished and unwritten, nested in other books, imagined by their authors and materialized only in the imaginations of their readers — a painfully vast body of potentially brilliant work that we’ll never get to hold in our hands. That’s not to say that every meta-book is a must-read; take for example The Dictionary of the Finnish Language by Caprinulge, which features in Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow – completely unreal and yet completely not something we’d choose to leaf through. Similarly, the white-supremacist The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard, thought up by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby is not all that high on our wish list. But then there are titles that, wholly made up, sound like they might be even more captivating than the books they live in. And it’s those that we never stop hoping will one day be in print. After the jump, peruse 16 titles we’d add to our bookshelves, if only we could.
“Higher Education” by Nathan Zuckerman, in The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer, like most of Roth’s books, is a never-ending layer cake of hypertext, filled with stories and stories about stories about stories. That we never get to read any works by the writers he endlessly talks up is an unavoidable frustration of reading Roth. But the unreadable story whose unreadability nags us most is his character Nathan Zuckerman’s short story “Higher Education.” Its publication is the source of a continuous dispute with his father, in a novel all about a boy with daddy issues. And while we get a three-page synopsis of the plot — a great aunt and uncle go to court over access to a trust fund — we struggle to figure out who is in the right, Zuckerman or his father, and make sweeping moral judgments without any understanding of how it all started.
Comments (21)
Oh come on, man. Number one fake book from fiction would have to The Guide in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Excuse me while I nerd out: during the “kissing scene” in _The Princess Bride_ there is a footnote stating there are extra pages describing the kiss Goldman could not include for fear of losing his “male audience.” If you wrote a letter to the address provided then he would mail you those missing chapters. I did just that! And I did receive a letter back; however, with no missing pages. Goldman described the copyright issues he was facing with the S. Morgenstern estate (he was apparently dealing with the son or grandson). He also mentioned a sequel to _The Princess Bride_ titled _Buttercup’s Baby_ …and was hoping to get the rights to this book. I had no idea I was stuck in a meta trap and actually went to the library to look for this book! So, if there was ever a fake book in TPB it would have to be the clandestine sequel, Buttercup’s Baby
end of nerd out.
doublenegative is right… Why no Hitchhiker’s guide? We all want to see that friendly book with “DON’T PANIC” on the cover.
Yeah, and the other number one fake book would have to be the yellow book that Lord Henry gives to Dorian in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
Is this list only limited to novels, because I would like to add to the queue “History of the Land Called Uqbar” from Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
The full Books of Bokonon from Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.”
That “yellow book” is actually a reference to “À Rebours” (Against Nature) by Huysmans, so it’s real and pretty great.
I must agree. I can not believe you didn’t include “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”! You even mention it when talking about the Galactica!
I clicked on this article precisely to find that one in your list.
Excellent idea for a list. One other book that comes to mind is Stanislaw Lem’s “A Perfect Vacuum,” which is a series of reviews for books that don’t actually exist: http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Vacuum-Stanislaw-Lem/dp/0810117339
“The History of Love” by Leo Gursky, in “The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss.
What? No love for Misery?
You seriously wouldn’t have eloped with a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if you had the chance?
…for shame
The Boat Rocker by Terrance Mann in W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe aka Field of Dreams is a grave oversight.
“Is Man a Myth?” is a book on Mr. Tumnus’ bookshelf in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Also, the cookery book, including recipes using Man and Marshwiggle, in “The Silver Chair.”
The Higher Common Sense by the Abbe Fausse-Maigre in Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.
[...] Ooh, I love this: Fake Books From Fiction We Wish We Could Read. [...]
How bout the Encyclopedia Qwqhlmiana from Cryptonomicon?
Oh come on – The Neverending Story! the one in the book where you get to go in to Fantastica and make it anew by giving the empress a new name and the whole wonderous shebang that we only get to read about Bastian doing when he reads the book. And, presumably, Carl Conrad Coriander.
By the way, the first chapter of Buttercup’s Baby is available in the 25th and the 30th anniversary editions of the book.
I would definitely read the Higher Common Sense.
I’ve always wanted to get a peak at The Arsonist’s Daughter from Wonder Boys
I wish I could read The Courtyard Hound from David Benioff’s book, City of Thieves. I also wish more people would read City of Thieves.
[...] last month when we rounded up a bunch of fake books from fiction that we wished that we could read? Well, today we have some slightly-related news to report: Our [...]
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