Name That Book

You may have read somewhere that “Valley of the Dolls” was originally called “They Don’t Build Statues to Businessmen,” or that Hitler wanted to call his book “Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice” instead of “Mein Kampf.”When it comes to titling a book, the only constant is change. And, as the following quiz suggests, the task of finding the right name only gets more difficult with each passing year.

1. The lawyers for what corporation objected to the use of the corporation’s name as the title of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise?”

a. AmeriDebt
b. Panasonic
c. Zenith
d. Stay Puft

2. Which person in which writer’s life recommended discarding which book title?

a. Anne Rice’s physician, “Interview With the Vampire”
b. Sarah Vowell’s mail carrier, “Assassination Vacation”
c.Kiran Desai’s college roommate, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard”
d. Edwidge Danticat’s copy editor, “Krik? Krak!”

3. The publishers of Andrew Solomon’s National Book Award-winning study of depression, “The Noonday Demon,” at one point suggested thatthe subtitle contain what phrase?

a. “The Bi-Polarization of the Country”
b. “Easy-to-Make Klonapiñata”
c. “The Up-and-Down of It All”
d. “Non-Financial Depression”

4. The etiquette doyenne Letitia Baldrige says that despite her best efforts, 22 of her 23 books have been named by her publishers. For example, she wanted to give her 1976 memoir,“Juggling,” the title “What I Did For Love,” but was told that it sounded like a memoir written by:

a. A teenager
b. A cast member of “A Chorus Line”
c. A troubled social worker
d. A hooker

5. “Bill, please God, don’t ask us to publish a book called _____,” was said by a book editor to which author of which book?

a. Bill Cosby, “You Are Somebody Special”
b. Bill Cosby, “Hooray for the Dandelion Warriors”
c. Bill Cosby, “Kids Say the Darndest Things: Cosby + Kids = Laughter!”
d. William L. Shirer, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”

6. Bret Easton Ellis’s mentor, Joe McGinniss, had two pieces of advice after reading the manuscript of “Less Than Zero.” One was that Ellis should not use his middle name (“You’ll sound like such a twit”). The other was, “And you should call your book ...”

a. “Home for the Holidays”
b. “Winter Vacation”
c. “Season’s Greetings”
d. “Kids Today: Who Can Figure Them?”

7. Toni Morrison wanted to call “Paradise,” her first novel after she won the Nobel Prize:

a. “Antipathy”
b. “Acrimony”
c. “War”
d. “Bloodsoak’t Chalice”

8. By the time Donald Trump’s “Surviving at the Top” came out in paperback in 1991, Trump had declared bankruptcy and was $2 billion in debt, so the bookwas renamed:

a. “The Art of Survival”
b. “How to Survive”
c.“Trump: La Lucha Continua”
d. “Do I Owe You Money?”

9. Around the offices of Grove Press, Maggie Paley’s 1999 nonfiction work, “The Book of the Penis,” was referred to as “The Big Book of Penises.” This nickname, in turn, gave way to a second nickname:

a. “Members Only”
b. “Penissimo!”
c. “The Book of Big Penises”
d. “How I Grew”

10. When Judy Blume was promoting “Wifey,” more than one interviewer thought the name of the book was:

a. “Wifery”
b. “Why Eat?”
c. “Wide Feet”
d. “White Feet”

11. Julian Barnes said he didn’t read “The Catcher in the Rye” until he was in his 40s because he thought it was a book about:

a.homosexual trysting
b. alcoholism
c. baseball
d. a wheat harvest

12. After repeatedly advertising that his forthcoming novel would be called “Wonderstruck,” Kurt Andersen changed the titleto “Heyday.” He did this because:

a.He found out that Erik Larson’s new book is called “Thunderstruck.”
b. His friends kept saying “Wonderstruck” in bad German accents.
c. His agent said the title “Heyday” might be “an easier film sale.”
d. Malcolm Gladwell pointed out to him that “Heyday” rhymes with “payday.”

13.Rick Moody, a self-described “bad titler,” originally wanted to call “The Ice Storm”:

a. “C.C.,” short for “cubic centimeters”
b. “F.F.,” short for “Fantastic Four” or a variant of the notation for “fortissimo”
c.“I.I.,” an allusion to the Me Decade
d. “G.G.,” a reference to Maurice Chevalier

14. Rick Moody, a self-described “bad titler,” originally wanted to call his story collection “The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven”:

a. “Ventriloquism on the Radio”
b. “Junkies at a Bakery”
c. “The History of Sighing”
d. “Fundamentalists at the Fern Bar”

15. Rick Moody, a self-described “bad titler,” originally wanted to call his story collection “Demonology”:

a. “Dancer at the Barre”
b. “The Carnival Tradition”
c. “Clown in My Coffee”
d. “Armand and the Amazing Danskin Crotch-Panel”

16. Bound galleys of “My Kind of Place,” Susan Orlean’s most recent nonfiction collection, were distributed to the media with the title “Homewrecker” on them. The title was eighty-sixed at the last minute because:

a. Barnes & Noble didn’t like it
b. Orlean’s editor didn’t like it
c. Orlean didn’t like it
d. Rick Moody didn’t like it