Smith’s I Live in a Hut (my own first book’s title follows this shorter-sentence mode). Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, for example, or shorter phrases like S.E. The best of them are like a poem in themselves, a preview of the style or voice or wildness I am to find in its pages. On the one hand, there are those books with long, strange, even zany titles–usually a phrase or a sentence, at least. I’ve noticed at least two major trends in contemporary poetry in terms of titles (there are certainly more). He ultimately picked a shorter, saner title, but the whole thing got me thinking about conventions in book-titling. Actually, there was some fancy German word for “migratory restlessness” that he originally thought sounded cool, but he obviously couldn’t name his book after the German word for “migratory restlessness”–so one of his friends suggested he name it The German Word for Migratory Restlessness. Personally, though, I’m more interested in book titles.Ī friend of mine wanted to name his second book Migratory Restlessness. The German Word for Migratory Restlessness, or, Beads: My Favorite Book Titlesįiction Editor Joe Hiland recently reflected on how a story’s title can build intrigue and interest from readers and editors, and I’m contractually and spiritually obligated to agree with everything he says.
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