nonexistentbooks.com

What is it

Excerpts From Nonexistent Books is an English personal literary blog hosted on WordPress.com. Each post is written as an "excerpt from a book that does not exist", with its title, credited author, and body all being original, fictional works. This format falls somewhere between short stories, writing exercises, and pseudo-literary archives, clearly inspired by the "imaginary books" tradition in the vein of Borges and Stanisław Lem.

Core Features

The core of the site is its large library of original, fragmented texts for reading. It offers a homepage chronological feed, post archive, random excerpt generator, comment section, RSS Feed, email subscription, and a dedicated "Resources for Writers" section. Scraped content shows the blog has been growing steadily since 2010: the author maintained a daily update schedule for many years, and used the platform as a space to test out novel concepts, characters, and plot points for NaNoWriMo.

Pricing

There is currently no paywall or membership lock displayed for the main content, so the majority of the work appears to be free and publicly accessible. Navigation links for Purchase and Goodies appear on the page, but no specific prices for physical goods, e-books, or merchandise are available in the scraped materials, so its business model cannot be confirmed.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• It has a highly distinct, cohesive concept, and its short, self-contained excerpts are easy to dive into, making it ideal for writers seeking inspiration, or looking to study narrative openings and subtle worldbuilding hints.
• Its years-long archive provides a substantial depth of content, and the RSS feed and random post feature preserve the exploratory fun of traditional blogs.

Cons

• It is not a full novel platform: many texts are intentionally presented as partial fragments, so readers looking for complete, ongoing storylines may feel unfulfilled.
• Additionally, the author announced in 2025 that they are ending their 15-year daily update schedule and moving to a hiatus / irregular posting cadence, so the site's activity level has dropped.

Who is it for

It is suited for literary enthusiasts with strong English reading skills, creative writers, writing course students, and anyone who enjoys short fiction, pseudo-reviews, and fictional archive-style texts. If you are looking for Chinese web novels, serialized ongoing updates, a commercial publishing-grade editorial system, or a dedicated mobile reading app, this site will not meet your needs.

Access in China

As the site is built on WordPress.com, its access stability within mainland China may be affected by network conditions. It is common for partial pages, subscription features, or comment functions to load inconsistently, so it is rated as "Partially Restricted".