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| Hearsay: |
Or girth, depending on how you look at it. Book titles are getting longer. Stories are getting shorter. Soon they will pass each other in a bizarre literary Möbius strip.
Think of what would have happened to George Orwell’s snappy title. 1984: One Man’s Discovery that Big Brother is Indeed Big but Hardly Fraternal and that Sex with Comrades Can Have Torturous Consequences.
You can forgive Herman Melville for adding “or, The Whale”, to Moby Dick, since, firstly it has no colon, and secondly, when he published it no one would have had a clue what it was all about. However, Moby Dick: How Ishmael Lost His Shipmates and Found His Soul While Chasing Jungian Archetypes Around the Globe and Carrying Out Experimental Marine Mammal Research, does not really cut the wasabi for the sushi.
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August 25th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
One of these days I fully expect to see a flash fiction collection whose title contains more words than the contents of the book. And it will probably be published by McSweeney’s.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Maybe we will start seeing jacket copy as the title. That way they get a good synopsis without having to turn the book over at all.
Therefore my podcast thriller
“65 Below”
would be titled
“After twenty years hunting terrorists under orders to “render harmless”, USMC Master Sergeant Marcus Orlando Johnson, Mojo to his friends, settles into a quiet rural retirement on his childhood home in the Alaskan backwoods. But the idyllic retirement is shattered when Marcus comes across soldiers of America’s staunchest enemy who are about to unleash a nightmarish biological weapon on the world from the most unexpected of places. With the help of his ex-fiancee, the beautiful Korean born State Trooper Lonnie Wyatt, and the chance reunion of his old special operations buddy Harley Wasner, they race to stop a potentially devastating terrorist attack with worldwide implications but even nature is against them as the temperatures plummet to 65 below.”
Hmmm…maybe we’ll need to do it in 6pt courier to make it fit. Or go the way of Time magazine and do multiple covers.
Basil
;-)