In his 1985 short story “Portraits of His Children,” George R.R. Martin writes of the intermittently successful novelist Richard Cantling. His first novel Hangin’ Out was autobiographical, about his growing up in Newark, N.J. Characters included Jocko, the Squid, Nancy and Dunnahoo, who hang out at Ricci’s Pizzeria. Family Tree and Rain came next, but didn’t sell well. Black Roses was Cantling’s fourth novel. Its main characters were a man named Richardson, and Cissy, a gorgeous redhead, and it had explicit sex scenes. It sold very well. Byeline came next, about Barry Leighton, a world-weary reporter at a failing newspaper; En Passant and Times Are Hard Cantling’s next two books, also flopped. His last-mentioned book was Show Me Where It Hurts, about a brutal rape and its aftermath; it was a bestseller.
I just finished Robert Harris’s very good but chilling alternative-history novel Fatherland, in which Nazi Germany wins World War II and, by 1964, dominates all of Europe. One of the characters is mentioned as reading Barbara Cartland’s The Kaiser’s Ball. Cartland wrote a lot of romances, but none by that name in our universe.
I’m very late to this thread, but I’d nominate Richard Stark’s rarest Parker novel Child Heist I loaned my copy to John Dortmunder and haven’t seen it since.
Bumped.
Conan Doyle told us that Sherlock Holmes wrote several monographs, including Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos; A Study of the Influence of a Trade upon the Form of A Hand; Upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus; A Study of the Chaldean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language; as well as the Practical Handbook in Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen, and the unfortunately still-unpublished four-volume *The Whole Art of Detection. *
Stephen King’s The Body is narrated by Gordon Lachance, who mentions he is now a writer of seven best selling novels about the supernatural. Let’s find them and stock them.
The collected newspapers of the Potterverse, documenting the activities of the Ginger Witch.
These days, a lot of libraries stock DVDs.
So,
The Purple Rose of Cairo (not Woody Allen’s film, but the film-within-a-film).
Lord of Light
See You Next Wednesday, John Landis’ film-within-a-film.
“The Pollution Solution”, described as the worst play ever written, in Ellen Conford’s MG novel Dreams of Victory. (Victory, the heroine, played “Litter”.)
John Shade’s “Pale Fire”, in your poetry section.
“The collected works of Gregor Markowitz.” (Referenced in Norman Spinrad’s “Agent of Chaos”
And while we’re on the subject of Spinrad, some of the other works of Adolf Hitler (referenced in “The Iron Dream”) sounded interesting. Heck, I wouldn’t mind going with you just to check out a world where Hitler was merely a hack SF writer.
And, of course: “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abendsen.”
I believe DVDs should be accessible also.
“Angels with Filthy Souls” and “Angels with Even Filthier Souls,” from The Home Alone movies would be good.
Of course, in the section containing the scripts for plays, we’d have “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.” and “Prisoners of Love,” both from The Producers.
Also, Ninja Vixen, starring Bette Midler’s character from Outrageous Fortune.
If you’re talking DVD’s too, put me down for a copy of “Buckaroo Banzai versus the World Crime League”.
I’d like The Adventures of Marvin Miggs, the Mad Muggle.
And Hogwarts: A History (I hold out a faint hope that JKR will actually write this!)
Does an index for this library exist?
Illuminating The Dark Fields - Mapping The American Psyche by Edward Morra
It came up in the Limitless (2011) thread, the title references the film’s source material.
I’d probably find most of Holmes’ works dreadfully dry, but I have to admit, I’d deary love to read a copy of “On the Dynamics of an Asteroid”, by the esteemed Dr. Moriarty.
Good one! The phrase is by F. Scott Fitzgerald, from near the very end of The Great Gatsby, and was used as an epigraph by Alan Glynn (his novel The Dark Fields is what became Limitless, and was republished under that name as a tie-in to the film):
“He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night…”
While this movie needed to exist IRL, I’m torn as to whether or not it should be included. As it wasn’t “in” the movie but was only a blurb at the end of the movie, it seems more like an ad for a never made sequel.
But, on the other hand, you could argue that it was there to enhance the concept of Buckaroo Banzai’s fictional universe, so it should be.
I’m way too over-thinking this. Fun, harmless thread; thumbs-up IMHO.
What about the fictional books I want created, like Gump Meets Trump or Forrest Trump?