(When We Can’t Remember the Title or Author)

When you are trying to find a favorite book from your childhood, or that novel you read for a class years ago and now wish you had kept, but you can’t remember any specific details, what do you do? Turn to the internet, of course.

How We Describe Books When We Can’t Remember the Title or Author examines the selective and often cruelly humorous nature of memory by taking, unaltered, the subject line of plot descriptions on internet book search forums. Marina Luz designs and paints book covers for these plaintive pleas for help in tracking down these half-remembered stories.

The resulting descriptions used as titles are alternately poetic and amusing. With memory being such a fickle thing, it stands to reason that a book written by an author who had hoped to tackle themes of love, loss, mortality, and the very meaning of existence could be boiled down to Complicated Love Story, a complex world of fantasy is reduced with devastating efficiency to Narnia-esque or that a richly-written character novel on overcoming adversity is remembered only as Victorian Prostitute with Dry Skin.