Titles We Have Known

15 Responses to “Titles We Have Known”

1. Maud Newton: Blog Says:
   September 19th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

   [...] the most common titles of submissions received at Virginia Quarterly Review in the past year are Smoke, Insomnia, Voyeur, [...]

2. heather (errantdreams) Says:
   September 21st, 2007 at 1:14 pm

   Butterfly surprises me a little, but Insomnia and Revelation? Not so much!

3. Jason Boog Says:
   September 21st, 2007 at 3:35 pm

   Great post, gave me all sorts of interesting things to think about.

   Why all this focus on one-word titles? Who are the writers convincing us that one-word titles are best? Has the age of the McSweeney’s-style long, ironical, wordy title passed?

4. Ted Genoways Says:
   September 21st, 2007 at 8:14 pm

   Thanks, Heather and Jason, for stopping by. I think the one-word titles are really a reflection of mathematics more than poetics. One-word titles are way more likely to be selected by multiple authors than two-word titles, much less long titles like A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I think that’s why longer titles are generally more memorable; quite simply, they’re more distinctive. But there are notable exceptions, of course—Delillo’s Underworld, McCarthy’s Suttree, Morrison’s Beloved, or Ha Jin’s Waiting (a title that made our list). And, lest we forget, Keats’s first book of poems was titled, well… Poems. So probably a great poem, a great story, or a great essay matters more than just a great title. After all, Raymond Carver pioneered the contemporary long title with stories like “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” but my favorite Carver story?—”Cathedral.”

5. Drew Johnson Says:
   September 24th, 2007 at 11:55 am

   Then again, long titles have their own predictability…and what was striking in Carver has become, after Eggers and Wallace, a Wes Anderson-like aesthetic uniformity. When you pick up a book like Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, you know that a certain kind of title, aesthetic, and literature has jumped the shark.

   You think this without having read the book. Then you read the book and see that you were right.

6. Michael Janairo - Books and literature reviews blog - Books Blog: A Conspiracy of Smart People » Warning to aspiring writers - timesunion.com - Albany NY Says:
   September 28th, 2007 at 9:55 am

   [...] writers September 28, 2007 at 10:55 am by Michael Janairo, Times Union Features Copy Desk Chief The Virginia Quarterly Review has posted the top 10 most common titles it receives in submissions this year. So you may want to [...]

7. Redzilla Says:
   September 28th, 2007 at 3:31 pm

   I still love “stolen” titles, like GW Clift’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’” That said, nothing would compel me to willingly read any story titled “Butterfly.”

8. Rob Says:
   October 1st, 2007 at 6:41 am

   How about:

   Revelations of an Insomniac Voyeur, Smoking and Waiting with Grace while Remembering his Work at the Butterfly Reunion

9. Mark Larson Says:
   October 1st, 2007 at 11:09 pm

   That’s fascinating. Do you know roughly what % of the total submissions fall under those titles?

10. mark larson | Says:
    October 1st, 2007 at 11:28 pm

    [...] probably gets about 10 billion submissions every year. On the VQR blog recently, they listed the most common titles among submissions they [...]

11. Waldo Jaquith Says:
    October 2nd, 2007 at 8:12 am

    Do you know roughly what % of the total submissions fall under those titles?

    Oh, it’s a tiny, tiny percentage. If, like, 20% of our submissions had those titles, I think we’d kill ourselves. (Or at least our editor would kill himself, and I feel confident he’d take me with him.)

12. Mark Larson Says:
    October 2nd, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    Phew. I was worried for a minute there.

13. crunching poetic numbers « A Patchwork Life: writing, teaching, and learning more each day Says:
    March 17th, 2008 at 9:38 pm

    [...] wonder what titles are most common in poetry these days? How about the most cliched topics that are actually still accepted? I don’t know about you, [...]

14. ninja typeface « upside down again. Says:
    March 20th, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    [...] percentages]And for those of us who obsess over this stuff, Virginia Quarterly has also released the top ten most common poetry titles they receive. ”Remember” tops the list. Don’t forget. 4. Web nerds are annoyingly obsessed [...]

15. The Importance of Titles « Boolah Says:
    July 10th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

    [...] at the Virginia Quarterly Blog, Waldo Jaquith has done everyone a great service by compiling the most common titles from the slush pile of material submitted to the magazine. Some titles from the 2007 list also [...]