When you find yourself trying to remember a show (or any works) that's on the tip of your tongue but just out of reach, come here - the collective brain of the TVTropes community can probably help. Post all the details you can remember (examples help). If you're looking for a trope, head over to Trope Finder. Have general questions about tropes? Visit Ask The Tropers!
Find a Show:
openNo Title Literature
Short story, part of a science fiction collection. It involves a woman whose husband is off on a business trip, so she has a friend of her husband come over to visit her. She realizes her loneliness and her attraction to him, and therefore seduces him (I seem to remember the start of it involving her asking him to stay there while she takes a shower and then coming back with the towel. They have torrid sex and while she's running her hands through his hair, she dislodges the wig and it's revealed that it's her husband dressed up as his friend whereupon he wishes her a happy birthday. I remember that when I first read it (probably around the early 90s), I saw it as her getting caught in the act with him having played this trick on her to let her have her wild fling while staying in the bounds of marriage and when I read it as an adult, I realized that they were probably role-playing from the start.
openNo Title Literature
It's a fantasy book for teens or children. Baby foxes are being born deformed. As foxes are beings of magic, this means the magic of the forest is dying.
An olive skinned witch meets with her human friend to try to find how to restore the forest's magic. She goes to find her aunt(?)/teacher in her snail-shell shaped spiraling house only to find her dead as a pile of dust.
I never finished the book. If it helps the main characters were no older than teenagers and I think the witch was described as plain. It mentioned her olive skin a lot.
openNo Title Literature
I remember a children's story where a cat hero is in the presence of someone important (like a king or queen). The cat misjudges a pounce and lands on the important person's lap, offending them.
openNo Title Literature
I'm struggling to remember this one book someone recommended to me a while back, so here I go (keep in mind this is recreated from memory, so much of it could be wrong): It's about an Alien Invasion of Earth with a quirk. Basically, every other species in existence is supposed to have psychic powers, and as such no conventional weapons are ever developed as lifeforms can use their mind-powers against each other. Then some alien race gets to Earth, but finds out that humans are not psychic, and cannot use their powers against them.
openNo Title Literature
From the Lawful Stupid page:
- An Eberron novel averts this: The main character is a paladin, who is traveling with a prostitute. While she never stops belittling his beliefs, he keeps giving her calm and rational arguments as to why selling her body may be a bad idea in the long run. At the end of the book, the paladin and his warforged companion confront the employer who double-crossed them. The employer is unarmed, with no guards around, and happily turns his back on them, since he knows no paladin would ever kill a defenseless man in cold blood. The pair leave. As they exit the compound...
Guard: Hey, didn't you have a big axe with you when you came in?Warforged: I left it with your boss.
Does anyone know what book this is? It sounds intriguing, but I had not luck with google or with the Eberron page [and subpages] itself... ^^;
openNo Title Literature
A few years ago I read this story, not sure whether it was a novel or a short story. It was definitely science fiction, though.
There's a planet with two lifeforms on it, and one takes care of the other. The one that's being taken care of has three 'genders': Parental, Rational and Emotional. The main story focuses on an Emotional who acts a lot like a Rational. She (Emotionals were referred to as 'she') grows up, finds a Parental and a Rational to be with. They merge, black out for a while, and end up with a baby Parental. Every family has one baby of each gender, in the same order each time. A while later, they merge again and have a Rational. About this time, there's this being of the other species that has discovered a new power source: the human universe. But the main character never gets to meet this being. The Emotional has heard that the families disappear when they've had an Emotional, and she tries to put it off for as long as possible. Eventually, though, she's forced into it and they have the Emotional. Afterwards, they find out that there is really only one species on the planet, and that the ones that take care of the others are the adult ones. They also find out that the mysterious being that discovered the power source was actually them all along. They also find out that using our universe as a power source makes our universe less dense and theirs more dense. The humans end up finding out and search for a universe more dense than their own to gain power from. Also, I'm not sure whether this was implied or explicitly stated, but the act of using a universe as a power source and reducing its density causes its Big Bang.
openNo Title Literature
Years ago I read a children's short story about a selfish princess. Her name was Emeralda or Esmerelda or something like that. At some point she was sent to live with a woman and her five daughters and learned not to be selfish. The daughters were named something like Annabell, Christobell, (two other ...bells) and Echo. "Four bells and an Echo" was the phrase used.
Does anyone remember this?
openNo Title Literature
A book that was part of a Kid Detective type series, which used the Goosebumps-like trick of ending chapters with a Cliffhanger that's quickly resolved by the first page or two of the next chapter. This is the specific chapter-ending cliffhanger I remember: The main character comes to suspect the owner of a local fried chicken restaurant of poisoning the food. The owner acts as a spokesman in his own commercials, and when the main character sees him filming an ad, he notices that he takes a bite of chicken on camera, then immediately spits it out once the director says cut. Of course, the opening of the next chapter has the main character confronting the restaurant owner, only to be told that it's actually common practice for actors in food commercials to do that, due to the many takes of eating that have to be filmed.
openNo Title Literature
This was a children's book. I recall very little about this...had it as a young kid in the 80's. The book contained a lot of colorful cartoon creatures that looked like household objects (I remember one looked like a phone) but looked like a different object when they flipped upside down.
openNo Title Literature
Trying to remember a short story I read back in 7th grade.
It takes place sometime in the future, and I think starts off with a family sitting at the breakfast table reading/watching the news. Apparently some sort of bill was passed that turns the US into a police state. The family seems uncaring, but the grandfather is really mad about the situation. He remakes that the flag "which currently has 56 or so stars" use to mean something. He then dresses up in his old clothes which happen to be that of a hippie, and travels to the town square to burn a flag. The flag doesn't catch fire due to it being made out of fireproof fabric, and a new police force shows up, and shoots the grandfather with laser guns.
The whole point of view was the grandsons.
I'm sorry if this is too vague
openNo Title Literature
A very strange book about two kids (one male, one female, narrated by the female). The female kind of knows this kid, and... I don't remember exactly what happens, but the line "(name) could be in cahoots with singing fourth-dimension monsters!" or something to that extent. The word "cahoots" was definitely used, as was the singing. Eventually both kids get transported to the fourth dimension, and I remember them being put in a cage by giant people. It's hard for them to make anything out, because they are in the fourth dimension and their eyes can't see it right. The giant people feed them a food that "tastes like ginger bread" and isn't too bad, and then the giants laugh because they can see the food traveling through their digestive systems. The kids somehow get out of the cage, on purpose or not, and end up finding a fourth-dimension snake that really scares them. They escape it, but that's all I remember of the book.
openNo Title Literature
I just remembered this because somebody else's query reminded me of it.
This was a children's book about an explorer who collected rare animals. The animals were outlandish fictional creations. He had all the rare animals from A-Y, and was on the trail of one that started with Z. He came up empty handed, and decided it must be extinct. The last page showed that there were some living in his house, and they danced around after he went to sleep.
The illustrations looked like Sven Nordqvist, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't him.
Edited by FloydPinkertonopenNo Title Literature
This may be borderline off-topic, but isn't there a Latin-language poet, I think late Republic, who's called the greatest who ever lived by dozens of contemporary sources, and yet we have no surviving works, likely due to pissing off the wrong people?
openNo Title Literature
I found this example in Pet Heir, and want to label it properly. Any idea what the book is called?
- A young adult novel (the title of which this troper cannot recall) featured a variant of this trope. A wealthy old lady left her estate and house to her cat for the rest of its natural life, under the care of a trustee; after the cat's death the house is to go to the city for a park. The book opens with the protagonists becoming suspicious of how long the cat has lived under the guardian's care, and they start to investigate.
Another example from Trash-Can Band:
- This troper can't remember the title or author, but knows she once read a picture book about a family where the four kids go down to the junkyard and find a bunch of trash that they use to make instruments. Their father is a painter and wants them to be quiet so he can work, and the parents are also none too thrilled about them building drum sets out of the kitchenware.
openNo Title Literature
I have two here:
1) A (I believe) historical fiction book with little stories about a Tom Sawyer-esque figure. The narrator of the book was his brother or something. Th Tom Sawyer-esque kid was something of a smart aleck genius type and well liked by other kids...two subplots I recall occurring was that one, they had a schoolteacher they all hated, so the main kid came up with a plan to frame him as an alcoholic, like putting beer cans into his coat. The second was how one of their other friends had lost a leg in a farm accident, so the Tom Sawyer-esque guy and his brother helped him train the other leg to be this really good leg wrestler. Or something. My fifth grade teacher read this to our class (I'm in university now), but I forgot to ask him over the summer what it actually was.
2) A beautifully crafted picture book that has to do with the alphabet. The entire story is that it's a message left behind from some explorer guy who tells you at the beginning that he's rediscovered a species everybody thought was extinct, but to make sure it stays safe he left clues in the pictures. Every picture is themed with a letter (A, B, C, etc.) and you need to find little clues. At the end, it turned out you needed to go back to the front cover, with all your clues, and the extinct animal is hidden in the picture...all the pictures were so vivid and colourful. I did solve it in the end, but I remember it was a super fun and intense time for me as a child...it took me WEEKS to solve.
openNo Title Literature
I recall reading a short story in school. It's about a blind beggar who tells how he became blind to a rich man. The beggar explains that he used to be able to see, but he worked in a chemical factory. One day there was a fire, and as everyone ran out, the beggar was knocked down and several people ran over him. He escaped in time to avoid being burned, but he was blinded by the chemical fumes. The twist ending is that his story is a lie. The rich man worked at the same plant, and he is the one who was knocked down. In fact, the beggar was the man who had knocked him down. The beggar then screams that it is unfair that he had gotten out in time but was blinded, while the man he knocked down was not only all right, but went on to become rich. The rich man then said, "I don't know what you're complaining about. I'm blind too."
openNo Title Literature
I think it must've been a comic, and the cover of it was yellow. There was an intro where this group of people duke it out, and then it takes a step back from the action to show that they were actually sperm. Then the comic starts for real.
openNo Title Literature
Hopefully I'll remember to check this one before it disappears, unlike all my other attempts to use this — I keep forgetting to check back, and forgetting what I even asked. Anyway, it's a Stephen King short story about a man who inherits or otherwise comes by a special scythe and field of wheat — the wheat is humanity, and when a stalk becomes ripe, it's that person's time to die. The man thinks he has ultimate power over life and death and can use this to protect his family forever... but it turns out he only has control of death — when a person's time is up, it's up, and failing to harvest them doesn't mean saving them — it means allowing them to exist in an unnatural comatose state. He discovers this via his family, and doesn't take it well.
openNo Title Literature
I remember reading a book series back in elementary school. A bunch of tiny aliens invade this kid's room. There were four or five of them, if I remember correctly. The only thing I really remember about them is that one of them was asked if he had brothers or sisters, and he responded "no, but I do have siblings," which weirded out the main character. Also, I think that there was some villain they were trying to defeat, and his name was really short and it may have been composed of initials, though I can't remember what the letters were.
Edited by Ventisia
The protagonist is a boy living in either Alaska or Canada with his grandfather. He needs to make money (I think his grandfather is sick), and his grandfather won't let him take money out of his college funds. The boy trains his dog as a sled dog and they enter a race for a cash prize. They are about to win and the dog's heart bursts and it dies right before the finish line. Another competitor takes out his gun and threatens to shoot anyone who crosses the finish line before the boy. The boy carries his dog's body over the line.
That was just as depressing to think about the second time.