Short story collection

Lauren has just shown me this v. amusing site, the Random Title Generator. It’s rather formulaic — one title is always [Adjective] + [Noun], another is always The [Noun] of the [Noun], etc., and the pool of potential words to be plugged in is relatively small — but still, if you play with it long enough, it yields some pretty entertaining results.

Here are my favorite titles, randomly generated by the internet, and their accompanying recommended plot summaries, randomly generated by my imagination:

The Cracked Person: a thriller graphic novel, about a man who, in a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong, accidentally combines his DNA with that of a pepper grinder*;

Vacant Voyages: genre: photography/psychoanalysis — pictures of people staring into space, with scholarly commentary;

The Unwilling Name: starring Hortense, or Tiglath-pileser the Third;

The Girl of the Person: a vacuous tale, to be sold exclusively by Urban Outfitters;

Lovely Snake: an epic poem, narrated by Cleopatra, describing her thoughts in the moments before she puts the asp to her breast;

The Magnificent Doors: a coffee-table book for people who love both architecture and Jim Morrison;

Crying in the Ice: über-depressing — will undoubtedly win the Booker Prize;

The Consort of the Petals: an eighteenth-century drama of scandal, passion, intrigue, decadence — basically, Dangerous Liaisons, except with flowers instead of people.


* this takes place in the future, obviously, when inanimate objects have been discovered to possess DNA...