So last month the girlfriend and I went to see Christopher Hitchens talk about his new book of memoirs. I’m not really into memoir so probably missed out on some of what he said, however, did get one real gem out of the evening.

Among other things, he and school friends – and later, other friends, including Salman Rushdie – used to play a game of inventing titles of books that didn’t quite make it. The favored example given was Mr Gatsby.

This has of course inspired us to come up with as many failed book titles as we can. I’ve started with the following:

Alice in an Interesting Place
The Conjuror of Oz
The Moderately Well Known Five
Diary of a Prostitute
Anne of the Green Roof (and the sequel, Anne from a Small Town)
The Manipulative Mr Ripley
The Unconcluded Novel
Older Girls
American Lunatic
A Long While Alone

The challenge is to guess all of the above titles – and come up with more failed novels.