Must be something in the water. Just as Henry draws our attention to short books, I see AbeBooks is highlighting books with single-letter titles. I could take this as an occasion to mock-deplore the twitterifictation (twitterfaction?) of literature. But life’s too short.
{ 14 comments }
eddie 10.14.10 at 12:53 am
Possibly twitrefaction.
John Holbo 10.14.10 at 1:03 am
Better, but that’s still 13 characters.
piglet 10.14.10 at 1:09 am
Off-topic for a topic suggestion. Am I alone on being regularly baffled by the outright bizarre treatment of matters European in the New York Times? This was published Monday:
John Holbo 10.14.10 at 1:13 am
Truly this is a threadjack for the ages, piglet. (I don’t really mind because I doubt there’s that much to be said about single letter book titles.)
praisegod barebones 10.14.10 at 5:13 am
I see that under 2 letter titles, ABE has listed books named ‘We’ by Charles Lindbergh and John Dickinson; but not the book of the same name by Yevgeny Zamyatin which predates both.
Kirk Ahrens 10.14.10 at 5:37 am
Yay, V and Y!
GeoX 10.14.10 at 6:36 am
V is in fact V. (with a period). Shouldn’t that count against it?
Pete 10.14.10 at 10:33 am
I’d just like to put in a personal reccomendation for the film of Z; it’s a political thriller that manages to convey very well the fear and confusion of street political gatherings on the brink of riot.
Brainz 10.14.10 at 12:35 pm
I can’t believe that no one has written I.
Phil 10.14.10 at 1:17 pm
G and C are both formally experimental Bildungsroman…s (Bildungsromänner?) What are the odds?
I also noticed the absence of the Story of O, but I suppose that doesn’t count.
Shelley 10.14.10 at 5:18 pm
They’re all “I.”
dr ngo 10.14.10 at 5:55 pm
Since I may be the only one who has read it, let me put in a good word for “M” by John Sack. It d0cuments a company (M Company, 2d battalion, 1st brigade, if memory serves) of US Army draftees through training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and on into Vietnam ca. 1967. As it happens, I went through Fort Dix the next year, in what I believe would have been the next company over (N? but they had renumbered the system by then), and I found it scrupulously accurate as to the training experience. I don’t know about the VN part – never got there, thank goodness – but I am convinced that Sack is an honest documentarian and skillful writer. If you’re interested in what it was like, trust him.
Salient 10.14.10 at 6:29 pm
Shouldn’t that count against it?
Maybe, but not in the AbeBooks sense, because they accepted e^2^ as a one-letter title.
piglet 10.14.10 at 6:49 pm
John, it wasn’t meant as a threadjack but as a serious topic suggestion that I thought was relevant for CT and there was no other place to post it. Maybe CT prefers to be a one-way exchange.
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