When I was writing my second novel, Australiana, I deliberated over the title for a long time.

I had many stories that were set in a regional community, and I had an essay and then a whole series of poems. The essay I ended up publishing separately as The Conquest of Land and Dream, and the poems are a largely unpublished sequence called Dispossession.

As for the stories, my working title was My Face is Nameless, which was a reference to James Baldwin. The issue with this as a title was that it didn’t bring together all the aspects of the book, and so I went searching for another title.

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I struck gold in an early interview with Don DeLillo. He is the author of Cosmopolis, Underworld, Libra and White Noise, but this interview was about his first book, Americana, which was released in 1971. DeLillo, as the son of Italian immigrants to the US, says in the interview that he titled his book Americana because he intended to write about all aspects of his........

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