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'Denton Welch's A Voice Through a Cloud was written largely during the final racking months before Welch's heart gave out. Echoing his own tragedy, it is a lyric, rebellious plaint of pain, fear and despair. The novel is also devastating in ways Welch did not intend. It breaks down painfully towards the end as Welch's physical condition became so dire that he was capable only of writing one sentence at a time, and the exertion of doing even this would exhaust and sicken him so severely he would need to lie very still for hours afterwards with a cold compress on his forehead until he regained the strength to add another sentence. The last few pages become insensible and the novel ends abruptly with Welch's final, inconclusive thought.'-- Michael de la Noy
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'The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities was intended as Samuel R. Delaney's sequel to his classic novel Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, but it looks like it will never see the light of day. Asked recently if he would ever finish and publish the sequel, Delaney's answer was "Probably not, I can't say for sure. Again, I haven't written it off entirely. I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in. A lot of it, as the diptych was originally planned out, was a celebration of lot of the stuff I saw at the time in the gay world. Sort of in allegorical form, a lot of that was being celebrated. There was a lot of the gay situation that made me rethink some of that, not in any kind of simplistic way, but in a fairly complicated way. So between the personal breakup, which was an eight-year relationship that came to ane nd, and the changes in the world situation, there were other things that sort of grabbed my interest more. That made the second one a little hard to go on. I still think there are some valid things to be said about it, in that second volume. And it's quite... I've got two or three more books, that I really would like to write, and at this point, my books take me three to five years. So that's 15 years, and I'm practically 70 years old. So I'll be in my 80s when those books are done, and I don't know whether I'm going to be writing anything, or even if I'm going to be here".'-- io9
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'Campo Santo is a hybrid volume, a posthumous act of packaging by W.G. Sebald’s German publisher Hanser.When Sebald died December 14, 2001, very shortly after the appearance of his fourth work of prose, Austerlitz, he apparently had not begun a new prose project. The crucial part of this book is the first section, which contains the four prose four pieces. After finishing The Rings of Saturn in the mid 1990s, Sebald, we are told, began a book on Corsica, which he eventually set aside in favor of Austerlitz. According to the editor of Campo Santo Sven Meyer, the Corsican fragments form the only new prose pieces by Sebald we are likely to see. The Corsican prose pieces in Campo Santo pose interesting questions for the reader of Sebald.The most obvious issue to me concerns the lack of images in the three main pieces. All four of Sebald’s full-length prose works employ images as an essential part of the “text.”But, with one exception, and that including an image not chosen by Sebald himself, the Corsican pieces are devoid of images. Was this going to be an unillustrated work or would Sebald have added images before finishing the manuscript?'-- Vertigo
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'When Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer Jan. 10, 1961, at age 66, he was a broken man. The architect of the modern American crime novel and the author of five classic works, Hammett was nearly penniless at the time of his death, his income attached by the Internal Revenue Service, his health destroyed by a six-month stint in federal prison. Despite his fragile health, he smoked and drank heavily and was prone to alcoholic blackouts. As he grew older, he wrote less and drank more until, finally, he wrote not at all. In his letters, Hammett makes reference to dozens of novels in progress, books with titles such as Dead Man's Friday, Toward Z and The Valley Sheep, all unfinished - or more likely never begun. The only incomplete Hammett novel for which any manuscript materials survives is The Secret Emperor. Working notes for The Secret Emperor, which was Hammett's first, never-finished novel, show that it included elements he later used in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key.'-- Wallace Stroby
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'Michael Chabon began writing Fountain City as a follow-up to his fine 1989 debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The story centered on an architect who dreamed of building the perfect baseball stadium. After five years, he gave up on the project. “Often when I sat down to work,” Chabon wrote later about the abandoned novel, “I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go. It was the Hand of Dread. I ought to have heeded its grasp.” He also wrote in the margins of Fountain City: “A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition.” It was a novel, he added, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” Upon abandoning the project, he immediately changed gears and wrote his next novel Wonder Boys in seven months.'-- A New Fiction Writers Forum
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'The Temple at Thatch was Evelyn Waugh’s first attempt at a novel, and its failure temporarily derailed him. Waugh began writing the book in 1924 during his final year as an undergraduate. The plot, according to diary entries, is largely autobiographical and based on the writer’s experiences at Oxford, with themes of madness and black magic. So what went wrong? In 1925 he gave the manuscript to his friend Harold Action, who criticized the book (Action later said: “It was an airy Firbankian trifle, totally unworthy of Evelyn, and I brutally told him so. It was a misfired jeu d’esprit.”). Waugh was so distraught that he burned the manuscript and went to the beach and started swimming out. In his biography, Waugh said: “Did I really intend to drown myself? That was certainly in my mind.” But a short way out, he was attacked by a jellyfish and swam back. For a while afterward, he stayed away from fiction writing, but soon returned.'-- PW
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'Truman Capote signed the initial contract for the novel Answered Prayers on January 5, 1966 with Random House. This agreement provided a $25,000 advance with a stipulated delivery date of January 1, 1968. Distracted by the success of his "nonfiction novel,"In Cold Blood, the Black and White Ball, television projects, short pieces and increasing personal demons, Capote missed his 1968 deadline. In July 1969 the contract was renegotiated, granting a "substantially larger advance" in exchange for a trilogy to be delivered in January 1973. The delivery date was further delayed to January 1974 and September 1977. A final agreement in early 1980 would have yielded Capote $1,000,000 to have been paid only if he submitted the manuscript by March 1, 1981. This final deadline was not kept. Capote first envisioned Answered Prayers as an American analog to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past that would come to be regarded as his masterwork.
'In the years prior to his death, Capote frequently read chapters from Answered Prayers to friends at dinners, but such was his gift of storytelling that few could discern whether he was actually reading from a manuscript or improvising. He attempted to sell one of the chapters to Esquire sometime in the early 1980s but balked and feigned illness when an editor asked to see the story. Capote claimed that lover John O'Shea had absconded with "A Severe Insult to the Brain" in 1977 and sued for repossession, but he eventually reconciled with O'Shea and dropped the lawsuit. At least one Capote associate claims to have acted as a courier for the full manuscript. According to Joseph Fox, four of Capote's friends claim to have read drafts of "Father Flanagan's All-Night Nigger Queen Kosher Cafe" and "A Severe Insult to the Brain". Capote regularly cited dialogue and plot points from these chapters in multiple conversations with Fox that never wavered or changed over the years. In his editor's note, Fox "hesitantly" theorized that the two chapters did exist at one juncture but were destroyed by Capote in the 1980s.
'Shortly before his death in 1984, Capote informed his friend Joanne Carson that he had finally finished Answered Prayers and was preparing to die in peace. Carson allegedly had read the three chapters prior to this date and described them as being "very long." On the morning preceding his death, Capote handed a key to Carson for a safe deposit box or locker that contained the completed novel, stating that "the novel will be found when it wants to be found." When Carson pressed Capote for a precise location, he offered a myriad of locations in various cities. An exhaustive search for the manuscript after Capote's death yielded nothing.'-- PBS.org
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'Seth Morgan wrote his first novel, the blistering Homeboy, during a brief layover between heroin habits. But despite a decent critical reception and a promising literary future, Seth jumped right back up on that horse. Maybe it was that five-figure advance on the paperback, burning a hole in his pocket. Shortly after the book's release, Morgan died in a drunken bike wreck. His second novel, Mambo Mephiste, was by his own account to be the definitive Mardi Gras novel. But only a few chapters and a synopsis exist, rescued from his apartment before it was tossed by the neighborhood junkies.'-- litreactor.com
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'Philip K Dick's last wife has reworked the novel the legendary science fiction author was working on when he died in 1982. Tessa Dick, who described her self-publication of The Owl in Daylight as a tribute to her former husband, was Dick's fifth and final wife, marrying him in 1973. She told online magazine the Self-Publishing Review that her version of the novel was an attempt to express "the spirit" of Dick's proposed book. Little is known about the novel, which Dick mentioned in a letter to his editor and agent. Very little material exists and it might be more accurate (if poor English!) to say that it is his unstarted novel. Tessa points out, Phil “spent months working out the plots for his novels” before committing them to paper: “The typing, however, is not the writing.” According to Tessa, the letter to Dick's agent revealed plans to "have a great scientist design and build a computer system and then get trapped in its virtual reality. The computer would be so advanced that it developed human-like intelligence and rebelled against its frivolous purpose of managing a theme park". The letter also mentioned Dante's Inferno and the Faust legend, she said.'-- Science Fiction World
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'Prince Jellyfish is an unpublished novel by American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson. The novel was Thompson's first, written around 1960 while he was in his early 20s and was working as a reporter for the Middletown Daily Record in New York State. Thompson had moved to Middletown from New York City, where he worked briefly as a copy boy for Time. Little is known about the book, although in Thompson's obituary, The Guardian described it as "an autobiographical novel about a boy from Louisville, going to the big city and struggling against the dunces to make his way." The book was rejected by a number of literary agents before Thompson moved briefly to Puerto Rico and then moved on to writing his next novel, The Rum Diary. The Rum Diary, too, was rejected by every literary agent to whom Thompson shopped it, and it remained unpublished until 1998, long after Thompson had become famous.'-- collaged
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'The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and Everything and More, a history of infinity. Wallace in his final hours had "...tidied up the manuscript of a novel he had been writing for over ten years so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. The novel had numerous working titles, some of them including 'Gliterrer', 'SJF' ('Sir John Feelgood'), 'What is Peoria For?', and 'The Long Thing', although he had settled on The Pale King. The drafts tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. Wallace was trying to write differently, but the path was not evident to him. “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Karen Green, his wife, says. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.” The problem went beyond technique. The central issue for Wallace remained how to in his words give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”'-- collaged from various sources
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Robert Musil worked on his monumental novel The Man Without Qualities for more than twenty years. Some of Musil's working titles were The Gutters, Achilles (the original name of the main character Ulrich) or The Spy. Musil's aim (and that of his main character, Ulrich) was to arrive at a synthesis between strict scientific fact and the mystical, which he refers to as "the hovering life." He started in 1921 and spent the rest of his life writing it. When he died in 1942, the novel was not completed. The first two books were published in 1930, the last and unfinished one posthumously by his wife Martha in 1942. He worked on his novel almost every day, leaving his family in dire financial straits. The novel brought neither fame nor fortune to Musil or his family. This was one of the reasons why he felt bitter and unrecognized during the last two decades of his life. Musil thought he had many years of productive work ahead of him, when he could complete his great novel. But the author died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, after an exercise session, on April 15, 1942. He was sixty-two years old. Critics speculate on the viability of Musil's original conception. Some estimate the intended length of the work to be twice as long as the text Musil left behind. As published, the novel ends in a large section of drafts, notes, false-starts and forays written by Musil as he tried to work out the proper ending for his book. In the German edition, there is even a CD-ROM available that holds thousands of pages of alternative versions and drafts.'-- Ted Gioia, Exhuming Robert Musil
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'Jim Carroll, the legendary Manhattan poet and punk rocker, died of a heart attack on Friday, Sept. 12, at the age of 60. Recently, Carroll, the author of The Basketball Diaries, had been working on a new novel called Triptych; his longtime editor at Penguin, Paul Slovak, said that it “tells the story of a hermetic and mystical 35-year-old painter who becomes kind of a golden boy in the late ’80s New York art world. It’s a very moving examination of spiritual bankruptcy and other themes in both art and life.” Mr. Slovak said Carroll had turned in revisions of the first two parts of the novel, but didn’t know how far he’d gotten on the third. He said it was possible something would come of the work, pending a conversation with Carroll’s literary agent, Betsy Lerner, but that it was too soon to tell.'-- The New York Observer
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'Richard Yates wrote at least three masterpieces: Revolutionary Road, Easter Parade (clearly recognized seminal novels of America in the second half of the 20th Century), and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, a superb collection of his early short stories. Yates was a kind of F. Fitzgerald of the 1960's, writing novels and story volumes about doomed post-WWII idealists colliding with reality. Yates' first books were hailed, but his later efforts received mixed reviews, and were seldom read. He kept at his trade through illness, nervous breakdowns, and drink by editors like Sam Lawrence at Delacorte and Esquire's Gordon Lish. Yates also wrote speeches for Bobby Kennedy, and taught creative writing at the University of Iowa. When the hard drinking, heavy smoking Yates died of emphysema in 1992, at the age of 66, none of his books remained in print. In the last month of his life, Richard Yates was working against deadline to finish his final (never completed andas yet unpublished) novel, Uncertain Times, based on his experience with Bobby Kennedy. He was in a skid row room (the kind he preferred to live and work in), surrounded by dead cockroaches he killed on work breaks, breathing oxygen for his emphysema from a huge canister, still smoking.'-- Zimbio
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'Woes of the True Policeman is a project that was begun at the end of the 1980s and continued until Robert Bolaño’s death. A version of the novel was eventually published consisting sections collated from typescripts and computer documents. In a 1995 letter, Bolaño wrote: “Novel: for years I’ve been working on one that’s titled Woes of the True Policeman and which is MY NOVEL. The protagonist is a widower, 50, a university professor, 17-year-old daughter, who goes to live in Santa Teresa, a city near the U.S. border. Eight hundred thousand pages, a crazy tangle beyond anyone’s comprehension.” The unusual thing about this novel, written over the course of fifteen years, is that it incorporated material from other works by the author, from Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls) to The Savage Detectives and 2666, with the peculiarity that even though it features some familiar characters, they belong to Bolaño’s larger fictional world, and at the same time they are the exclusive property of this novel. The novel's remains exuded a strong consciousness of death, of writing as an act of life, which was part of Bolaño’s biography, since the Chilean writer was condemned to write his limitless fiction against the clock.'-- Works in Progress
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'Nikolay Gogol began writing Dead Souls in 1836 while living in Paris, finishing the first volume in 1841 while on a visit to Rome. After returning to Russia in October, Gogol, with the help of the critic Vissarion Belinsky, printed the first volume in 1842. Belinsky called it a “deeply intellectual, social and historic work.” The work on the second tome of Dead Souls coincided with Gogol’s deep spiritual crisis and mainly reflected his doubt on the effectiveness of literature, putting him on the edge of denouncing his previous creations. In 1849-1850, Gogol read parts of the second volume of Dead Souls to his friends. Their approval and delight encouraged him to work twice as hard. In spring, he made his first and only attempt to create a family. He proposed to Anna Wielhorski, who turned him down. On 1 January 1852 Gogol informed everyone that the second volume was “completely finished.” But at the end of the month, signs of a new personality crisis appeared. He was tormented by a sense of approaching death, worsened by new doubts in his success as a writer. On 7 February Gogol confessed and took communion and on the night of 12 February he burnt the clean manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. Only five unfinished chapters remained from various draft editions, which were published in 1855. On the morning of 21 February Gogol died in his apartment in Moscow.'-- Russia Now
Some others
Gustave Flaubert Bouvard et Pécuchet
René Daumal Mount Analogue
Lew Welch I, Leo
Thomas Mann Confessions of Felix Krull
James Joyce Stephen Hero
Stephen King The Plant
Mina Loy Goy Israels
Ralph Ellison Three Days Before the Shooting
Brad Gooch The Silver Age of Death
Dale Peck Red Deer
Frank O'Hara (untitled)
Albert Camus Le premier homme
Herman Melville The Confidence Man
Edith Wharton The Buccaneers
Sylvia Plath Double Exposure
Henry James A Sense of Time
Ingeborg Bachmann The Book of Franza
Georges Perec 53 Days
Jack Kerouac Old Bull in the Bowery
Chester Himes Plan B
Alain-Fournier Colombe Blanchet
Stendahl Lucien Leuwen
Robert Shea Children of the Earthmaker
Pier Paolo Pasolini Petrolio
James Dickey Crux
Alexander Pushkin The Negro of Peter the Great
Charles Bukowski The Way the Dead Love
Kingsley Amis Black and White
Fyodor Dostoevsky Netochka Nezvanova
Georges Bataille Ma Mere
Jane Bowles Out in the World
Joe Orton Head to Toe
Alberto Moravia I due amici
Osamu Dazai Gutto Bai
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*
p.s. Hey. I'm away helping shoot a film, and you're here looking back at some novelists who couldn't get one of their things done. It'll be the same story tomorrow, only you won't looking at the same thing. I guess all of that is self-explanatory, oops. Hope all are and is well.
'Denton Welch's A Voice Through a Cloud was written largely during the final racking months before Welch's heart gave out. Echoing his own tragedy, it is a lyric, rebellious plaint of pain, fear and despair. The novel is also devastating in ways Welch did not intend. It breaks down painfully towards the end as Welch's physical condition became so dire that he was capable only of writing one sentence at a time, and the exertion of doing even this would exhaust and sicken him so severely he would need to lie very still for hours afterwards with a cold compress on his forehead until he regained the strength to add another sentence. The last few pages become insensible and the novel ends abruptly with Welch's final, inconclusive thought.'-- Michael de la Noy
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'The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities was intended as Samuel R. Delaney's sequel to his classic novel Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, but it looks like it will never see the light of day. Asked recently if he would ever finish and publish the sequel, Delaney's answer was "Probably not, I can't say for sure. Again, I haven't written it off entirely. I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in. A lot of it, as the diptych was originally planned out, was a celebration of lot of the stuff I saw at the time in the gay world. Sort of in allegorical form, a lot of that was being celebrated. There was a lot of the gay situation that made me rethink some of that, not in any kind of simplistic way, but in a fairly complicated way. So between the personal breakup, which was an eight-year relationship that came to ane nd, and the changes in the world situation, there were other things that sort of grabbed my interest more. That made the second one a little hard to go on. I still think there are some valid things to be said about it, in that second volume. And it's quite... I've got two or three more books, that I really would like to write, and at this point, my books take me three to five years. So that's 15 years, and I'm practically 70 years old. So I'll be in my 80s when those books are done, and I don't know whether I'm going to be writing anything, or even if I'm going to be here".'-- io9
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'Campo Santo is a hybrid volume, a posthumous act of packaging by W.G. Sebald’s German publisher Hanser.When Sebald died December 14, 2001, very shortly after the appearance of his fourth work of prose, Austerlitz, he apparently had not begun a new prose project. The crucial part of this book is the first section, which contains the four prose four pieces. After finishing The Rings of Saturn in the mid 1990s, Sebald, we are told, began a book on Corsica, which he eventually set aside in favor of Austerlitz. According to the editor of Campo Santo Sven Meyer, the Corsican fragments form the only new prose pieces by Sebald we are likely to see. The Corsican prose pieces in Campo Santo pose interesting questions for the reader of Sebald.The most obvious issue to me concerns the lack of images in the three main pieces. All four of Sebald’s full-length prose works employ images as an essential part of the “text.”But, with one exception, and that including an image not chosen by Sebald himself, the Corsican pieces are devoid of images. Was this going to be an unillustrated work or would Sebald have added images before finishing the manuscript?'-- Vertigo
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'When Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer Jan. 10, 1961, at age 66, he was a broken man. The architect of the modern American crime novel and the author of five classic works, Hammett was nearly penniless at the time of his death, his income attached by the Internal Revenue Service, his health destroyed by a six-month stint in federal prison. Despite his fragile health, he smoked and drank heavily and was prone to alcoholic blackouts. As he grew older, he wrote less and drank more until, finally, he wrote not at all. In his letters, Hammett makes reference to dozens of novels in progress, books with titles such as Dead Man's Friday, Toward Z and The Valley Sheep, all unfinished - or more likely never begun. The only incomplete Hammett novel for which any manuscript materials survives is The Secret Emperor. Working notes for The Secret Emperor, which was Hammett's first, never-finished novel, show that it included elements he later used in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key.'-- Wallace Stroby
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'Michael Chabon began writing Fountain City as a follow-up to his fine 1989 debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The story centered on an architect who dreamed of building the perfect baseball stadium. After five years, he gave up on the project. “Often when I sat down to work,” Chabon wrote later about the abandoned novel, “I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go. It was the Hand of Dread. I ought to have heeded its grasp.” He also wrote in the margins of Fountain City: “A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition.” It was a novel, he added, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” Upon abandoning the project, he immediately changed gears and wrote his next novel Wonder Boys in seven months.'-- A New Fiction Writers Forum
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'The Temple at Thatch was Evelyn Waugh’s first attempt at a novel, and its failure temporarily derailed him. Waugh began writing the book in 1924 during his final year as an undergraduate. The plot, according to diary entries, is largely autobiographical and based on the writer’s experiences at Oxford, with themes of madness and black magic. So what went wrong? In 1925 he gave the manuscript to his friend Harold Action, who criticized the book (Action later said: “It was an airy Firbankian trifle, totally unworthy of Evelyn, and I brutally told him so. It was a misfired jeu d’esprit.”). Waugh was so distraught that he burned the manuscript and went to the beach and started swimming out. In his biography, Waugh said: “Did I really intend to drown myself? That was certainly in my mind.” But a short way out, he was attacked by a jellyfish and swam back. For a while afterward, he stayed away from fiction writing, but soon returned.'-- PW
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'Truman Capote signed the initial contract for the novel Answered Prayers on January 5, 1966 with Random House. This agreement provided a $25,000 advance with a stipulated delivery date of January 1, 1968. Distracted by the success of his "nonfiction novel,"In Cold Blood, the Black and White Ball, television projects, short pieces and increasing personal demons, Capote missed his 1968 deadline. In July 1969 the contract was renegotiated, granting a "substantially larger advance" in exchange for a trilogy to be delivered in January 1973. The delivery date was further delayed to January 1974 and September 1977. A final agreement in early 1980 would have yielded Capote $1,000,000 to have been paid only if he submitted the manuscript by March 1, 1981. This final deadline was not kept. Capote first envisioned Answered Prayers as an American analog to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past that would come to be regarded as his masterwork.
'In the years prior to his death, Capote frequently read chapters from Answered Prayers to friends at dinners, but such was his gift of storytelling that few could discern whether he was actually reading from a manuscript or improvising. He attempted to sell one of the chapters to Esquire sometime in the early 1980s but balked and feigned illness when an editor asked to see the story. Capote claimed that lover John O'Shea had absconded with "A Severe Insult to the Brain" in 1977 and sued for repossession, but he eventually reconciled with O'Shea and dropped the lawsuit. At least one Capote associate claims to have acted as a courier for the full manuscript. According to Joseph Fox, four of Capote's friends claim to have read drafts of "Father Flanagan's All-Night Nigger Queen Kosher Cafe" and "A Severe Insult to the Brain". Capote regularly cited dialogue and plot points from these chapters in multiple conversations with Fox that never wavered or changed over the years. In his editor's note, Fox "hesitantly" theorized that the two chapters did exist at one juncture but were destroyed by Capote in the 1980s.
'Shortly before his death in 1984, Capote informed his friend Joanne Carson that he had finally finished Answered Prayers and was preparing to die in peace. Carson allegedly had read the three chapters prior to this date and described them as being "very long." On the morning preceding his death, Capote handed a key to Carson for a safe deposit box or locker that contained the completed novel, stating that "the novel will be found when it wants to be found." When Carson pressed Capote for a precise location, he offered a myriad of locations in various cities. An exhaustive search for the manuscript after Capote's death yielded nothing.'-- PBS.org
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'Seth Morgan wrote his first novel, the blistering Homeboy, during a brief layover between heroin habits. But despite a decent critical reception and a promising literary future, Seth jumped right back up on that horse. Maybe it was that five-figure advance on the paperback, burning a hole in his pocket. Shortly after the book's release, Morgan died in a drunken bike wreck. His second novel, Mambo Mephiste, was by his own account to be the definitive Mardi Gras novel. But only a few chapters and a synopsis exist, rescued from his apartment before it was tossed by the neighborhood junkies.'-- litreactor.com
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'Philip K Dick's last wife has reworked the novel the legendary science fiction author was working on when he died in 1982. Tessa Dick, who described her self-publication of The Owl in Daylight as a tribute to her former husband, was Dick's fifth and final wife, marrying him in 1973. She told online magazine the Self-Publishing Review that her version of the novel was an attempt to express "the spirit" of Dick's proposed book. Little is known about the novel, which Dick mentioned in a letter to his editor and agent. Very little material exists and it might be more accurate (if poor English!) to say that it is his unstarted novel. Tessa points out, Phil “spent months working out the plots for his novels” before committing them to paper: “The typing, however, is not the writing.” According to Tessa, the letter to Dick's agent revealed plans to "have a great scientist design and build a computer system and then get trapped in its virtual reality. The computer would be so advanced that it developed human-like intelligence and rebelled against its frivolous purpose of managing a theme park". The letter also mentioned Dante's Inferno and the Faust legend, she said.'-- Science Fiction World
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'Prince Jellyfish is an unpublished novel by American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson. The novel was Thompson's first, written around 1960 while he was in his early 20s and was working as a reporter for the Middletown Daily Record in New York State. Thompson had moved to Middletown from New York City, where he worked briefly as a copy boy for Time. Little is known about the book, although in Thompson's obituary, The Guardian described it as "an autobiographical novel about a boy from Louisville, going to the big city and struggling against the dunces to make his way." The book was rejected by a number of literary agents before Thompson moved briefly to Puerto Rico and then moved on to writing his next novel, The Rum Diary. The Rum Diary, too, was rejected by every literary agent to whom Thompson shopped it, and it remained unpublished until 1998, long after Thompson had become famous.'-- collaged
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'The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and Everything and More, a history of infinity. Wallace in his final hours had "...tidied up the manuscript of a novel he had been writing for over ten years so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. The novel had numerous working titles, some of them including 'Gliterrer', 'SJF' ('Sir John Feelgood'), 'What is Peoria For?', and 'The Long Thing', although he had settled on The Pale King. The drafts tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. Wallace was trying to write differently, but the path was not evident to him. “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Karen Green, his wife, says. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.” The problem went beyond technique. The central issue for Wallace remained how to in his words give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”'-- collaged from various sources
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Robert Musil worked on his monumental novel The Man Without Qualities for more than twenty years. Some of Musil's working titles were The Gutters, Achilles (the original name of the main character Ulrich) or The Spy. Musil's aim (and that of his main character, Ulrich) was to arrive at a synthesis between strict scientific fact and the mystical, which he refers to as "the hovering life." He started in 1921 and spent the rest of his life writing it. When he died in 1942, the novel was not completed. The first two books were published in 1930, the last and unfinished one posthumously by his wife Martha in 1942. He worked on his novel almost every day, leaving his family in dire financial straits. The novel brought neither fame nor fortune to Musil or his family. This was one of the reasons why he felt bitter and unrecognized during the last two decades of his life. Musil thought he had many years of productive work ahead of him, when he could complete his great novel. But the author died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, after an exercise session, on April 15, 1942. He was sixty-two years old. Critics speculate on the viability of Musil's original conception. Some estimate the intended length of the work to be twice as long as the text Musil left behind. As published, the novel ends in a large section of drafts, notes, false-starts and forays written by Musil as he tried to work out the proper ending for his book. In the German edition, there is even a CD-ROM available that holds thousands of pages of alternative versions and drafts.'-- Ted Gioia, Exhuming Robert Musil
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'Jim Carroll, the legendary Manhattan poet and punk rocker, died of a heart attack on Friday, Sept. 12, at the age of 60. Recently, Carroll, the author of The Basketball Diaries, had been working on a new novel called Triptych; his longtime editor at Penguin, Paul Slovak, said that it “tells the story of a hermetic and mystical 35-year-old painter who becomes kind of a golden boy in the late ’80s New York art world. It’s a very moving examination of spiritual bankruptcy and other themes in both art and life.” Mr. Slovak said Carroll had turned in revisions of the first two parts of the novel, but didn’t know how far he’d gotten on the third. He said it was possible something would come of the work, pending a conversation with Carroll’s literary agent, Betsy Lerner, but that it was too soon to tell.'-- The New York Observer
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'Richard Yates wrote at least three masterpieces: Revolutionary Road, Easter Parade (clearly recognized seminal novels of America in the second half of the 20th Century), and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, a superb collection of his early short stories. Yates was a kind of F. Fitzgerald of the 1960's, writing novels and story volumes about doomed post-WWII idealists colliding with reality. Yates' first books were hailed, but his later efforts received mixed reviews, and were seldom read. He kept at his trade through illness, nervous breakdowns, and drink by editors like Sam Lawrence at Delacorte and Esquire's Gordon Lish. Yates also wrote speeches for Bobby Kennedy, and taught creative writing at the University of Iowa. When the hard drinking, heavy smoking Yates died of emphysema in 1992, at the age of 66, none of his books remained in print. In the last month of his life, Richard Yates was working against deadline to finish his final (never completed andas yet unpublished) novel, Uncertain Times, based on his experience with Bobby Kennedy. He was in a skid row room (the kind he preferred to live and work in), surrounded by dead cockroaches he killed on work breaks, breathing oxygen for his emphysema from a huge canister, still smoking.'-- Zimbio
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'Woes of the True Policeman is a project that was begun at the end of the 1980s and continued until Robert Bolaño’s death. A version of the novel was eventually published consisting sections collated from typescripts and computer documents. In a 1995 letter, Bolaño wrote: “Novel: for years I’ve been working on one that’s titled Woes of the True Policeman and which is MY NOVEL. The protagonist is a widower, 50, a university professor, 17-year-old daughter, who goes to live in Santa Teresa, a city near the U.S. border. Eight hundred thousand pages, a crazy tangle beyond anyone’s comprehension.” The unusual thing about this novel, written over the course of fifteen years, is that it incorporated material from other works by the author, from Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls) to The Savage Detectives and 2666, with the peculiarity that even though it features some familiar characters, they belong to Bolaño’s larger fictional world, and at the same time they are the exclusive property of this novel. The novel's remains exuded a strong consciousness of death, of writing as an act of life, which was part of Bolaño’s biography, since the Chilean writer was condemned to write his limitless fiction against the clock.'-- Works in Progress
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'Nikolay Gogol began writing Dead Souls in 1836 while living in Paris, finishing the first volume in 1841 while on a visit to Rome. After returning to Russia in October, Gogol, with the help of the critic Vissarion Belinsky, printed the first volume in 1842. Belinsky called it a “deeply intellectual, social and historic work.” The work on the second tome of Dead Souls coincided with Gogol’s deep spiritual crisis and mainly reflected his doubt on the effectiveness of literature, putting him on the edge of denouncing his previous creations. In 1849-1850, Gogol read parts of the second volume of Dead Souls to his friends. Their approval and delight encouraged him to work twice as hard. In spring, he made his first and only attempt to create a family. He proposed to Anna Wielhorski, who turned him down. On 1 January 1852 Gogol informed everyone that the second volume was “completely finished.” But at the end of the month, signs of a new personality crisis appeared. He was tormented by a sense of approaching death, worsened by new doubts in his success as a writer. On 7 February Gogol confessed and took communion and on the night of 12 February he burnt the clean manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. Only five unfinished chapters remained from various draft editions, which were published in 1855. On the morning of 21 February Gogol died in his apartment in Moscow.'-- Russia Now
Some others
Gustave Flaubert Bouvard et Pécuchet
René Daumal Mount Analogue
Lew Welch I, Leo
Thomas Mann Confessions of Felix Krull
James Joyce Stephen Hero
Stephen King The Plant
Mina Loy Goy Israels
Ralph Ellison Three Days Before the Shooting
Brad Gooch The Silver Age of Death
Dale Peck Red Deer
Frank O'Hara (untitled)
Albert Camus Le premier homme
Herman Melville The Confidence Man
Edith Wharton The Buccaneers
Sylvia Plath Double Exposure
Henry James A Sense of Time
Ingeborg Bachmann The Book of Franza
Georges Perec 53 Days
Jack Kerouac Old Bull in the Bowery
Chester Himes Plan B
Alain-Fournier Colombe Blanchet
Stendahl Lucien Leuwen
Robert Shea Children of the Earthmaker
Pier Paolo Pasolini Petrolio
James Dickey Crux
Alexander Pushkin The Negro of Peter the Great
Charles Bukowski The Way the Dead Love
Kingsley Amis Black and White
Fyodor Dostoevsky Netochka Nezvanova
Georges Bataille Ma Mere
Jane Bowles Out in the World
Joe Orton Head to Toe
Alberto Moravia I due amici
Osamu Dazai Gutto Bai
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p.s. Hey. I'm away helping shoot a film, and you're here looking back at some novelists who couldn't get one of their things done. It'll be the same story tomorrow, only you won't looking at the same thing. I guess all of that is self-explanatory, oops. Hope all are and is well.