[Rob Stuart]

Do it, John!

[John Whitworth]

'Tis Pity She's A Whorehouse at Pooh Corner?
The Black Cathouse at Pooh Corner?
The Brick Shithouse at Pooh Corner? (Need a book called The Brick Shithouse - surely a great Australian novel)

As for the other, this ought to do it. Cripes, I must write it!

Breakfast at Tiffanys and The Naked Lunch

Katy from Kansas, orphaned and alone,with a fistful of dollars from the sale of the family farm and eager for sophistication and experience, fresh off the flyer at Grand Central Station encounters the enigmatic and picturesquely scarred Viscount Ribblesdale, heir to an age-old title but little else except the whiff of scandal from liaisons with the the nazi-loving Prince of Wales and blackmailing boy lovers. She gets a borrowed tiara but loses her fresh-faced freckled innocence along with her knickers, all in the course of a single morning in New York. Set in Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age, this searing indictment of European greed and corruption and the spoiled American Dream, harks back to Henry James and forward to Tom Wolfe. In relentless jewelled prose reminiscent of the best of Nabokov Pulitzer-Prizewinner Hannah de Selby anatomises the hopes and fears of a whole generation.

[Brian Allgar]

"Don't go near the Water Babies" - but I can't muster up any enthusiasm for either component.

[Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead]

I've only just picked up this thread but had been playing with Bleak Pooh; as with so many of this Comp's possibilities, titles are perhaps the easy bits.

[basil ransome-davies]

I was thinking of going for 'The Economic Consequences of the Fall', by Milton Keynes, but alas it would fall outside the rubric.

[Brian Allgar]

Why so, Bazza? Anyway, a book by 'Milton Keynes' is surely too good to waste. "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency" ... except perhaps by debauching the only two existing members of society? But I must resist the temptation to start messing about with your idea.

[basil ransome-davies]

Originally Posted by Brian Allgar

Why so, Bazza? Anyway, a book by 'Milton Keynes' is surely too good to waste. "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency" ... except perhaps by debauching the only two existing members of society? But I must resist the temptation to start messing about with your idea.

I think to 'merge' the titles you have to use both, or part of both, & Milton didn't write 'The Fall', that was Camus. 'The Economic Consequences of Paradise Lost' would be a clunky & unamusing title.

[Brian Allgar]

True, Bazza, but the 'brief' doesn't actually specify combining the titles, although it certainly adds to the fun if it can be done. You could always use Milton's opening line instead, which might be more amusing:

'The Economic Consequences Of Man's First Disobedience'