In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are saved, its sobering to realize that some of the worlds greatest prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty, wry, and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history lesson, part expos, The Book of Lost Books is the first guide to literatures what-ifs and never-weres.In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination:Aristophanes Heracles, the Stage Manager was one of the playwrights several spoofs that disappeared.Loves Labours Won may have been a sequel to Shakespeares Loves Labours Lostor was it just an alternative title for The Taming of the Shrew?Jane Austens incomplete novel Sanditon, was a critique of hypochondriacs and cures started when the author was fatally ill.Nikolai Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls after a religious conversion convinced him that literature was paganism.Some of the thousand pages of William Burroughss original Naked Lunch were stolen and sold on the street by Algerian street boys.Sylvia Plaths widower, Ted Hughes, claimed that the 130 pages of her second novel, perhaps based on their marriage, were lost after her death.Whether destroyed (Socrates versions of Aesops Fables), misplaced (Malcolm Lowrys Ultramarine was pinched from his publishers car), interrupted by the authors death (Robert Louis Stevensons Weir of Hermiston), or simply never begun (Vladimir Nabokovs Speak, America, a second volume of his memoirs), these missing links create a history of literature for a parallel world. Civilized and satirical, erudite yet accessible, The Book of Lost Books is itself a find.From the Hardcover edition.