Books Never Written -- Yet Written About Quiz

Answer: 'The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966' (by Richard Brautigan)

(A is for Abortion) 'The Abortion' is about a trip to Tijuana for an abortion, but also about a library which acts as a repository for unpublished manuscripts. (Of the wrong choices, the only other one that is actually a novel is Bradbury's, and the many books mentioned in 'Fahrenheit 451' are all real. Wolfe's 'Acid Test' recounts the history of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and although it discusses hippie-era literature, the books mentioned are all real.

The Enormous Room is cummings' war memoir.)

Answer: Emory Bortz

(B is for Bortz) In this erudite little novel, former Berkeley professor Emory Bortz helps Oedipa piece through the conflicting versions of the 'Courier's Tragedy.' (Mucho is Oedipa's husband; Dr. Hilarius is her ex-Nazi Freudian therapist; Blobb is the author of a contemporary account of a massacre ordered by Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera.)

Answer: Oolon Colluphid

(C is for Colluphid) The philosopher Colluphid, invented by Douglas Adams for the Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy, is said to have a grudge against god due to his mother having been frightened by a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses while pregnant. (Senonesis is a fictional philosopher invented by Lawrence Sterne; Duban the Sage is a character in the 'Thousand Nights and a Night'; and the Jesuit Amice is a fictional author from Sorrentino's 'Mulligan Stew'.)

Answer: Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life

(D is for Dawns) Although Flashman was a very rakehell -- a womanizer, a boozer and a cad -- his official biography, as part of his public image, was designed to add to (rather than detract from) Flash Harry's precious credit. It therefore tells the bowdlerized and expurgated version of his life history with bluff modesty, as would have befitted a plain-spoken soldier. (Each wrong answer is, by contrast, either blatantly self-aggrandizing or overly confessional --as well as being wrong.)

Answer: Umberto Eco

(E is for Eco) The real-life Italian author invented the two fictional Italian authors. Temesvar's work is mentioned in 'The Name of the Rose', De Amicis' in 'Foucault's Pendulum'.

Answer: 'The Fall of the House of Usher', by Edgar Allen Poe

(F is for Fall) Canning's book is a key element of 'Fall'. Roderick's friend reads to him from it to calm him, but the parallels between 'Trist' and the burial of Madeline drive Roderick over the edge and catalyze the real book's climax.

Answer: Edward Gorey

(G is for Gorey) 'The Toothpaste Murder' and 'The Toastrack Enigma' were by D. Awdrey-Gore in the 'Awdrey-Gore Legacy'; 'A Moral Dustbin' was by C. F. Earbrass in 'The Unstrung Harp'.

Answer: Hope Springs Internal

(H is for Hope) All three wrong answers are from Borges' 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'. The Encyclopedia is unattributed, the other two are attributed to Silas Haslam. (All three wrong answers contain words from titles of Borges books, and Borges, writing in Spanish, would not have created a title incorporating a pun in English.)

Answer: John Irving

(I is for Irving) In 'The World According to Garp', I. S. Garp wrote 'Cuckold' and 'Bensenhaver'; Jenny Fields wrote 'Suspect'.

Answer: 'Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit', by P. G. Wodehouse

(J is for Jeeves) 'Rex West' is actually the nom de plume of Percy Gorringe, a one-time fiance of Florence Craye (daughter of Lord Worplesdon and frequent fiancee of Bertie Wooster, not to mention of Stilton Cheesewright). Percy is the step-son of dyspeptic newspaper tycoon Lemuel Gengulphus Trotter.

Answer: Sebastian Knight

(K is for Knight) Vladimir Nabokov created this novelist for 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight', which purports to be a biography by Knight's half-brother V., who is outraged by the inadequacies of Knight's previously published biography. However, stumped for anything substantive to write, V. begins plundering characters from Knight's novels and stories, peopling his biography with its subject's own inventions.

Answer: The Love Parade

(L is for Love) All three wrong answers are also fictional works appearing in the book; I had to make this one tricky since the correct answer figures so prominently in the film adaptation of the real-life novel. 'The Land Downstairs' is by Grady Tripp; 'Kind of Blue' is by John Jose Fahey; and 'Abominations' is by Albert Vetch under the pen-name August Van Zorn (a nom de plume Chabon himself has taken to adopting on occasion).

Answer: Jo March, from 'Little Women' (by Louisa May Alcott)

(M is for March) 'To the seaside they went, after much discussion, and though Beth didn't come home as plump and rosy as could be desired, she was much better, while Mrs. March declared she felt ten years younger. So Jo was satisfied with the investment of her prize money, and fell to work with a cheery spirit, bent on earning more of those delightful checks.

She did earn several that year, and began to feel herself a power in the house, for by the magic of a pen, her 'rubbish' turned into comforts for them all. THE DUKE'S DAUGHTER paid the butcher's bill, A PHANTOM HAND put down a new carpet, and the CURSE OF THE COVENTRYS proved the blessing of the Marches in the way of groceries and gowns.'

Answer: Narnia

(N is for Narnia) Lucy finds these in Mr. Tumnus' cave in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'.

Answer: Patrick O'Brian

(O is for O'Brian) Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey are the heroes of O'Brian's phenomenally popular series of Napoleonic War-era books.

Answer: 'Possession: A Romance', by A.S. Byatt

(P is for Possession) Ash and LaMotte, both their lives and their work, are central to the critically-acclaimed real-life novel, as two modern scholars become literary detectives to unravel the mystery of the poets' relationship.

Answer: Quidditch Through the Ages

(Q is for Quidditch) 'Quidditch' was first introduced to the world as a fictional title referred to in J. K. Rowling's phenomenally successful Harry Potter series of books. In 2001, the author actually wrote and released 'Quidditch' as a real-world companion volume to the series.

Answer: Francois Rabelais

(R is for Rabelais) Rabelais' 'La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel' (books appearing 1532-1552), while extremely erudite, and often subtle in the play of its disquisitions on morality, religion and politics (Rabelais was a monk, a medical student and perhaps a physician, and an extremely learned man) is on the whole so bawdy, so vulgar, and so uproariously crude that the word 'rabelaisian' now refers to crude scatological or sexual humor.

Answer: J. D. Salinger

(S is for Salinger) D.B. was Holden's older brother. He used to be a 'real writer' but now Holden is disappointed with him for selling out and moving to Hollywood.

Answer: Kilgore Trout

(T is for Trout) In 'Breakfast of Champions', 'Slaughterhouse Five', 'Galapagos' and 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater', Kurt Vonnegut alludes to the writings of a sort of alter-ego of himself, Kilgore Trout. Unlike Vonnegut, Trout is a broken-down, decrepit old hack whose writing never became popular, but his style (if not his genre) is actually exactly like Vonnegut's.

Answer: 'The Uppity Loins' (by Randy Harvard), 'A Velvet Trench' (by Joy Cumming)

(U is for Uppity - V is for Velvet) Banks and Moon are authors invented by P.G. Wodehouse, Beebe and Lavish are authors invented by E. M. Forster (the title of Lavish's work, written under the pen name Joseph Emery Prank, does not occur in the novel 'A Room With a View' - Forster fans had to wait until the film adaptation to learn the title), and Cropper and Stern are scholars invented by A. S. Byatt.

Answer: Augustus Whiffle, 'On the Care of the Pig'

(W is for Whiffle) P. G. Wodehouse's gentle, eccentric Lord Emsworth, constantly plagued by imposters, sisters and secretaries, finds solace in his prize-winning sow Empress and in Whiffle, the authority on pig-breeding.

Answer: Zzazz Xxaxx, author of "A Brave New 'Whirled': Revolving Thoughts of Thinking Machines"

(X is for Xxaxx) Lem wrote in Polish; a fictional title he invented would be unlikely to contain a pun in English.

Answer: Parson Yorick

(Y is for Yorick) After the success of 'Tristram Shandy', success, Sterne published some of his own sermons as 'The Sermons of Mr. Yorick'. Within the fictional world of Tristram Shandy, Parson Yorick was the author of 'Dramatic Sermons'. (Dr. Slop was the author of 'Treatise on Midwifery', Slawkenbergius of 'De Nasis' (a treatise on noses), and hobby-horsical Uncle Toby of 'A (Short) List of the Virtues of the Widow Wadman'.)

Answer: Zeno's Paradox Resolved, by Methods Both A Priori and A Posteriori

(Z is for Zeno) Although the great detective was a prolific writer and a decided polymath, his (known) subjects include forensics, philology and natural history (among others) but never philosophy.