Titular

The borders are porous--between fiction and non-fiction. I understand that.

While it's great to live in an era of no borders/liminal zones and extreme fluidity where classifications are concerned, I feel like in the world of writing the borderlessness has generated a plethora of "ugly" sounding titles.

What's with a title like You Shall Know Our Velocity? (Dave Egger's first novel)

Or, with a title like A Working Theory of Love? (Scott Hutchins' forthcoming novel)

Here is a list of titles from a medley of short fiction and novels by Jonathan Safran Foer:

A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease ( a New Yorker short story)

Extremely loud and Incredibly Close ( a novel).

The titles are evocative of hypotheses, or of self-help mantras, not of imaginary places and things that used to be the domain of fiction titles.

I think it all began with Martin Scorsese's monstrous sounding There Will be Blood.