Welcome to Excerpts from Nonexistent Books! Each entry is a short piece of fiction designed to seem as if it’s a part of a longer book, just enough to give a sense of a larger work lurking in the shadows. It’s an old writing exercise of mine that seemed like a good idea for a weblog, so here it is.
The titles and authors for each excerpt are made up, and aren’t intended to reflect anything more than the occasional bad pun. Likewise, the excerpts themselves are original. A few bits and pieces of pop culture or echoes of existing works might creep in, but they’re simply side effects of an author living in a media age and not intentional plagiarism.
As for the author, it should be obvious enough that he’s a librarian; any other details aren’t really relevant in telling a good story (or part of one, anyway). Do tell me if you’d particularly like to see a longer (2500 words or so) fleshing-out of one of the excerpts here, and I’ll see what I can do!
Anyone interested in subscribing via RSS can use the feed page here: http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com/feed/
September 8, 2010 at 12:48 pm
hi just read your about page. I’m intrigued! I’ve signed up and will now go off exploring your site.
April 6, 2011 at 10:43 pm
I love the idea of this blog
April 7, 2011 at 9:41 am
Thank you! I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for someone to say that
May 28, 2011 at 11:20 pm
Let me tell you something about your blog.
I look forward to each of your posts.
I haven’t read all of the 5 billion (estimated) “excerpts” you’ve written and I plan on entertaining myself with them for some time.
I know you’ve asked us if there are any that we would like to see more of but I don’t have a favorite as of yet. What else are you working on? If this is little more than an exercise for you then what does your hard work go into? I would like to see that.
May 31, 2011 at 11:27 am
Thank you! I can’t tell you how much a nice comment like that means to me.
This site serves as my daily writing exercise; I put in a fair amount of work in on novel-length projects as well. I’ve got a sci-fi/historical fiction book out to agents right now (unsuccessfully so far) and a noir-style mystery about two-thirds complete.
September 12, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Cool concept!! I love it! Very Stanislaw Lem (A Perfect Vacuum — book reviews of non-existent books) and Borges (obviously!! haha)…
September 14, 2011 at 11:59 am
Thanks! That means a lot to me.
Would you believe I had never read Borges when I started this? I had only read people who had read him.
September 14, 2011 at 10:22 pm
What of his have you read since then? Have you read Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum? You really should… It’ll be right up your alley considering the things you write. How can you resist book reviews of non-existent books?
September 14, 2011 at 11:22 pm
I’ve read Borges’ complete short fiction and poetry (in translation) since then. Fabulous stuff all. I do still need to read Lem, but it can be hard to find recent translations at a good price for him.
September 17, 2011 at 1:31 pm
If I remember correctly, the translation for A Perfect Vacuum as top-notch. I can’t believe (to my knowledge) that the translations of Solaris which are out are still translations of the FRENCH translation not from the Polish — which is terrible…
May 17, 2012 at 4:08 am
I found you through D.A. Bancroft, and this blog is absolutely amazing. I think that sooner or later I will have to do a mock cover for one of the mock books…
May 17, 2012 at 8:20 am
Thank you so much for the kind comment! And if you’re ever moved to do such a mock cover, I will totally post/link to it