Why wasn't Thomas Hardy's first novel ever published? Were the short lines of Virgil's Aeneid awaiting a rewrite? What happened to the manuscript of the long-promised "magnum opus" that Truman Capote never delivered? Why did John Keats abandon Hyperion? Whether sidelined by an attack of writer's block or a dissatisfied editor's rejection, or halted by a bizarre twist of circumstance or an untimely death, nearly 60 lost and unfinished works are profiled here, tantalizingly presented with imagined cover art by contemporary book designers as well as with author profiles and manuscript extracts. Find out why Evelyn Waugh burned the manuscript of his first novel and then tried to drown himself, what happened to Kurt Vonnegut's If God Were Alive Today, and why we never got to read Karl Marx's comic novel Skorpion und Felix.