5 of the Best Books That Only Exist in Fictional Universes
To paraphrase Cicero, a world without books is like an anglerfish without a nightmarish flashlight made of its own body, so when creators build fictional universes, they often include literature. Sometimes, they’re too good at it, leaving you longing to put down the actual book (or movie or series) and devour the fake one. Like…
The You You Are
The fact that the self-help book written by Mark S.’s flighty brother-in-law plays a key role in radicalizing the Severance gang is all the more hilarious because what little we hear of it suggests it’s a pitch-perfect satire of new age grifter drivel. Apple’s release of a 40-page excerpt — which details, among other things, the author’s experience as a child of performers who make art out of birth and armed robbery and his enjoyment of “the first crisp bite of a fresh banana” — just confirms it. A 15-hour audiobook would be too short.
An Imperial Affliction
An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten is so good that it’s the driving force of the romance at the center of The Fault in Our Stars, but it only exists as a few sentences quoted by the couple. All we know about it is that it’s about a girl with cancer, her one-eyed mother who’s obsessed with tulips and a Dutch tulip salesman who might be neither of those things. Author John Green has suggested that an approximation of the experience can be achieved by reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Peter De Vries’s The Blood of the Lamb and trying “to blend the feeling of those two books,” but that would require reading Infinite Jest.
Sterling’s Gold: Wit & Wisdom of an Ad Man
Of all the fictional characters deserving of memoirs, Mad Men’s Roger Sterling would no doubt produce one of the juiciest. Alas, it seems we’ll never get more than the snippets we heard him dictate — a replica was published, but it’s just a collection of his lines from the series. Not a single sordid story about Miss Blankenship in sight.
The Coffee Table Book of Coffee Tables
The point of Kramer’s coffee table book of photos of celebrity coffee tables is to be ridiculous, but don’t act like that wouldn’t be one of the most popular Instagram accounts in the Metaverse. Their interior design choices would be far more interesting than their lunches or their children, and we pay good money to see those. There’s an officially licensed miniature replica, but 1) There are no celebrity coffee tables, and 2) Kramer’s book folds out into a coffee table. The miniature does that, too, but it’s far too small to actually support a cup of coffee. That’s the beauty of it!
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The idea of a crowdsourced repository of all human knowledge that can be accessed by a handheld device was such a good idea that someone went and invented Wikipedia. There are no entries on Vogon poetry, and it won’t read itself out loud in a soothing monotone, but slap a “DON’T PANIC” cover on an iPad and that’s about the size of it. In fact, they made an iPad app of the Guide, but it contained nowhere near over five million entries, so what’s the point?
In an ironically human move, the book we made to fill the void left by the nonexistence of the book is actually better than the book.
