Literal Titles
Single Letter Book Titles
I remember distinctly seeing the paperback edition of Andy Warhol's
"a" in the Coop, and thinking, "My God, now I have an excuse to
buy "V" and "Z", and then I can look for the other 23!"
I didn't, but since then I've felt a collector's twinge whenever I've
spotted another one-letter book title. So now, I collect
them in my imagination...
"Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you
read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful.
O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply
deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries
of the world, including Alexandria."
James Joyce, "Ulysses".
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A, Tom Bullough;
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a, Andy Warhol;
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"A", Louis Zukofsky;
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B, Sarah Kay;
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c, Thomas Sowell;
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C, Maurice Baring;
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"C", Anthony Cave Brown;
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C, Tom McCarthy, favored to win the Booker prize in 2010,
though it lost to Jacobson's "The Finkler Question";
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D, Robert Harris (based on his screenplay for a
movie about the Dreyfus case);
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E, Matt Beaumont (Published in 2000. An epistolary
novel in which email is employed);
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F, Daniel Kehlmann (Published in 2013; about three deceptive brothers.
Kehlmann is the author of "Die Vermessung der Welt",
: "Measuring the World");
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G, John Berger (Winner of the Booker prize);
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H., Lin Haire-Sargeant, (Heathcliffe returns);
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H, Elizabeth Shepard;
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H, Philippe Sollers;
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I: Stephen Dixon;
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J: A Novel, Howard Jacobson;
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K, Robert Calasso;
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K., Ronald Hayman, (a Kafka biography);
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K., Bernardo Kucinski;
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K, Mary Roberts Rinehart;
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L., Erlend Loe;
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M, John Sack, (the story of M company in the Vietnam war);
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M, John Muth;
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N: A Romantic Mystery, Louis Edwards;
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N, Arthur Machen;
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N, John Alan Scott;
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O, Omari Grandberry;
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O: a presidential novel, by Anonymous (John McCain's
speech writer Mark Salter);
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P, Andrew Lewis Conn;
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Q, Christine Dalcher;
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Q, Stephen Leacock;
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Q, Luther Blissett (pseudonym. Published in 2004, translated
from Italian, and the work of four authors);
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Q, a novel, Paul Nigro;
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Q, Evan Mandery;
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S., J J Abrams;
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S, the English translation of a book written partly in
English and partly in French, by seven authors, (Harry Mathews,
Jean Echenoz, Florence Delay...) with the French
title Semaines de Suzanne;
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S., John Updike;
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T, Victor Pelevin;
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V, Thomas Pynchon;
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W ou le souvenir d'enfance, [W, or the Memory of Childhood]
by Georges Perec, a member of Oulipo, and author of "La Disparition"
in which no "E" appears;
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X, Ilyash Shabazz;
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X, Sue Coe;
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X, Sue Grafton;
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Y, Marjorie Celona;
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Y: the Last Man, Brian Vaughn et al (Initial publication 2002,
a graphic novel, in which all but two bearers of the Y chromosome
have died off);
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Z, Michael Thomas Ford.
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Z, Therese Anne Fowler (a fake memoir of Zelda Fitzgerald).
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Z, Vassily Vassilikos.
Close but no cigar, to:
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& or Ampersand, Craig Conley;
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Apostrophe, Darren Wershler Henry, Bill Kennedy.
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\ or Back Slash, William Lovejoy;
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[Brackets], David Sloan;
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CDB, William Steig;
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Co. Aytch, Sam Watkins, an actual memoir of the American Civil War.
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The D. Case, Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini pick up
Dickens's unfinished "Mystery of Edwin Drood";
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DC, Gore Vidal;
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... or Ellipsis, Amanda Fink;
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! or Exclamation Mark, Amy Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld;
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/ or Forward Slash, Mark Edwards and Louise Voss;
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Guillemots, Webster's Timeline History, 1587-2007, Philip Parker
(this may be a preposterous book!);
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HHhH, Laurent Binet, (2010, a novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich;
The title is an abbreviation for "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich", that is,
"Himmler's brain is named Heydrich");
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I, etcetera, Susan Sontag;
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Interrobang, Jessica Piazza;
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N or M?, Agatha Christie;
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The Story of O, Pauline Reage;
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`` or Quotataion Marks, Marjorie Garber;
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RUR, [Rossum's Universal Robots], Karel Capek;
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; or Semicolon, Naveed Khan;
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U and I, Nicholson Baker.
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XO, by Francis Nenik, who kindly alerted me to the Kehlmann book "F".
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Z for Zachariah, Robert O'Brien;
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(is an element of), Jacques Roubard; the actual title is
the mathematical symbol used to indicate that an object belongs to
a set; the book is a collection of 361 poems, each corresponding
to a move in the game of Go;
Thanks to Stephen Frug for several friendly letters and new examples!
One nice thing about the idea of this collection was its finiteness.
I wouldn't be needing a lot of storage, even if I managed to get a
complete collection!
Last modified on 12 October 2020.