First books, second thoughts: embarrassing debuts - quiz

Try again … using Tipp-Ex to blank out the first words of a manuscript. Photograph: Alamy

1. In a 1975 review, critic Anthony Thwaite was unimpressed by a fantasy novel published by Gollancz, writing: 'An imagination is there, but so detached from anything I recognise or respond to that it illuminated nothing.' Whose debut was he dismissing?

   1. M John Harrison

   2. Salman Rushdie

   3. Ursula K Le Guin

   4. David Mitchell

2. 

   Neil Gaiman calls the 'rock'n'roll biography' with which he began his publishing career in 1984 the worst thing he has ever written. But which pop sensation was its subject?

   1. Barry Manilow

   2. Def Leppard

   3. The Velvet Underground

   4. Duran Duran

3. Tobias Wolff’s first book is a Vietnam war novel that was published in the UK in 1975, but never appeared in the US. Critic Wyatt Mason said that if you read it you can understand why: 'The book is a simplistic, moralising mess.' But what was it called?

   1. Ugly Rumours

   2. The Heart of Apocalypse

   3. The Short-Timers

   4. Good Afternoon, Vietnam

4. 

   Steven Spielberg once advised readers to 'read this book and learn from young Martin Amis’s horrific odyssey round the world’s arcades before you too become a video-junkie'. Long out of print, what was this first foray into nonfiction called?

   1. The Rachel Papers

   2. A Million Little Pieces: How Computer Games Broke Me

   3. Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines

   4. Girls Wouldn’t Understand: Why Blip, Pong and Beep Beep Are Brill

5. Which celebrated novelist made her debut with an empowering volume called Fit for the Future: The Guide for Women Who Want to Live Well?

   1. Jeanette Winterson

   2. Ali Smith

   3. Margaret Drabble

   4. Jilly Cooper

6. 

   Written in just 10 days, JG Ballard’s first novel was, according to its author, 'just a piece of hackwork' and that his second - The Drowned World – was his real launching point. What was the name of the pre-debut?

   1. The Concrete Building from Nowhere

   2. The News from Nowhere

   3. The Wind from Nowhere

   4. The Man from Nowhere

7. Gilbert’s Gobstopper opens when the eponymous hero loses the eponymous sweet down a drain. 'I wrote the book before I had learnt to draw properly,' sighed the author. 'What I notice now is the wonky faces and my dogged refusal to tackle any scene with challenging perspective.' But whose literary career was launched with this picture book?

   1. Shirley Hughes

   2. John Burningham

   3. Mark Haddon

   4. Judith Kerr

8. 

   When asked in 2000 about his first novel, Philip Pullman declared it 'so bad, I’m not even going to tell you the title'. What was this 1972 story of two brothers called?

   1. The Haunted Storm

   2. The Dreaming Spires

   3. Village of Thieves

   4. Compass of Fools

9. Lust by Count Palmiro Vicarion was a pornographic tale written in the 1940s, described by its author as 'not a good novel'. The Count was a pseudonym for which writer later celebrated for his poetry?

   1. Stephen Spender

   2. Christopher Logue

   3. Felix Dennis

   4. Peter Porter

10. 

    Samuel Beckett was often disparaging about his own books, but especially so of one of his earliest, a book of criticism that he later said was written in 'cheap, flashy philosophical jargon' that even he didn’t wholly understand. Who was it about?

    1. Robert Musil

    2. Saki

    3. James Joyce

    4. Marcel Proust

Solutions

1:B - It was called Grimus. Peter Kemp once called it 'a ramshackle surreal saga based on a 12th-century Sufi poem and copiously encrusted with mythic and literary allusion, [Grimus] nosedived into oblivion amid almost universal critical derision.', 2:D - Gaiman now holds the rights to the copyright and has kept it out of print (but a secondhand copy has been known to sell for around $4,500 if you have the budget to find out how bad it is)., 3:A - In 2003, Wolff said: 'It was the best I could do at the time, but it really wasn't very good.', 4:C, 5:A - It has an excellent cover., 6:C, 7:C, 8:A, 9:B, 10:D

Scores

1. 8 and above.

   Wow. Did you learn to play Space Invaders from Martin Amis?

2. 5 and above.

   Go do some lunges with Jeanette Winterson and try again.

3. 0 and above.

   Oh dear. Still, probably can't blame you for not reading these.

4. 10 and above.

   Wow. Did you learn to play Space Invaders from Martin Amis?