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An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read
Random House
April 2006
368 pages
ISBN: 1400062977
Hardcover
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Literature and Fiction | Historical
In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are
saved, it's sobering to realize that some of the world's
greatest prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty, wry,
and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective
story, part history lesson, part expose, THE BOOK OF LOST
BOOKS is the first guide to literature's what-ifs and
never-weres. In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals
details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the
acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave
drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true
stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only
in imagination: �Aristophanes' Heracles, the Stage Manager was one of the
playwright's several spoofs that disappeared.
�Love's Labours Won may have been a sequel to Shakespeare's
Love's Labours Lost--or was it just an alternative title for
The Taming of the Shrew?
�Jane Austen's incomplete novel Sanditon, was a critique of
hypochondriacs and cures started when the author was fatally
ill.
�Nikolai Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls after a
religious conversion convinced him that literature was
paganism.
�Some of the thousand pages of William Burroughs's original
Naked Lunch were stolen and sold on the street by Algerian
street boys.
�Sylvia Plath's widower, Ted Hughes, claimed that the 130
pages of her second novel, perhaps based on their marriage,
were lost after her death. Whether destroyed (Socrates' versions of Aesop's Fables),
misplaced (Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine was pinched from his
publisher's car), interrupted by the author's death (Robert
Louis Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston), or simply never begun
(Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, America, a second volume of his
memoirs), these missing links create a history of literature
for a parallel world. Civilized and satirical, erudite yet
accessible, THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS is itself a find.
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