Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Some critics believe that this story was added to One Thousand and One Nights by one of its European translators.

Tarzan

The Mangani language is depicted as a primal universal language shared by a number of primate species in the books.

The White Man's Burden

Although the poem mixed exhortation with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States understood the phrase as justifying imperialism as a noble enterprise.

For Dummies

The name of the cartoon comes from Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was Percy Shelley's wife.

Night by Elie Wiesel

It is the first book in a trilogy — Night, Dawn, and Day — reflecting Wiesel's state of mind during and after the Holocaust.

The Lord of the Rings (Bored of the Rings is the parody)

Bored of the Rings was written by Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney, who later founded National Lampoon. It was published in 1969 by Signet for the Harvard Lampoon.

Marcel Proust

Known for In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past of course.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

London acknowledged using it as a source and claimed to have written a letter to Young thanking him.

"...Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
..."

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n"

From Paradise Lost, of course.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Kvetch

The Yiddish word 'kvetch' means 'to complain/to whine'.

Oz

Nickname of Dickens - Boz, Shelley poem - Ozymandias, Biblical home of Job - Land of Uz, what Baum saw on a file cabinet - O-Z. Snopes.com lists the origin as undetermined.

How Much Land Does a Man Need?

James Joyce once called it "the greatest story that the literature of the world knows."

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of ___."

Library

It is from his Poema de los Dones (Poem of the Gifts) that he wrote after going blind. The poem talks about the the irony of God making him blind but giving him the love of books.

Isak Dinesen/ Karen Blixen

She is of course best known for Out of Africa.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe

It has been claimed as the first detective story.

China

The works are considered to be the pinnacle of China's achievement in classical novels, influencing the creation of many stories, theater, movies, games, and other entertainment throughout East Asia.

Gimpel the Fool

It was translated from Yiddish into English by Saul Bellow.

Scientology

All covers of post-1967 editions of the book feature an exploding volcano.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The novel follows Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, and a number of other characters. Most events occur while the Airmen of the fictional 256th squadron are based on the said island.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The book was written in 1883 and 1884, a few years before the publication of A Study In Scarlet, the first story to feature Holmes.

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield

He was modelled on Dickens' father, John Dickens.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

It was studied, as if factual, in German classrooms after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent years before. It was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the twentieth century. Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies which were distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s.

Don Quixote

Travel

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the ___ ___ of the universe."

"benign indifference"

In the original French, the sentence is "la tendre indifférence du monde". The word 'gentle' replaces 'benign' in another translation.

How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis

It documented the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. Due to the recent invention of flash photography, Riis was able to capture the unlit areas of tenements and expose wretched working and living conditions.

Flying carpets

If- by Rudyard Kipling

The poem's line, "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same" is written on the wall of the Centre Court players' entrance at Wimbledon.

'A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm'

Isaac Asimov

The Three Laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's fiction. Runaround is notable for featuring the first explicit appearance of the Three Laws of Robotics, which had hitherto only been implied in Asimov's robot stories.

Mina Murray from Dracula, Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines and Hawley Griffin from The Invisible Man

The essay

He became famous for his ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with anecdotes. His volume Essais (translated literally as Attempts) contains some of the most widely influential essays ever written.

"Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey."

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia")

The book was called "a novel traveling under the cover of autobiography," and is Lawrence's personal version of the historical events of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks of 1916 to 1918.

The Nine Billion Names of God

The story was the winner (in 2004) of the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Short Story for the year 1954 and also received a response from Dalai Lama.

Red Star Over China

Along with Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, it was the most influential book on Western understanding and sympathy for China in the 1930s.

Magical realism

Literary magic realism is commonly understood to have originated from Latin America.

Sohrab and Rustum

The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Monkey's Paw

Joel Chandler Harris, known for recording Brer Rabbit stories from the African-American oral tradition

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Coral Island

Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 - the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a Turkish citizen.

The Alexandria Quartet

Published between 1957 and 1960, the books present four perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II.

Professor Moriarty, the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco, California who start a club known as "the Joy Luck Club," playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods. The book is structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

..., Run,   ... Redux,   ... Is Rich,   ... At Rest,   ... Remembered.

Rabbit

All works of John Updike, of course

HIV/AIDS

Shilts' premise is that while AIDS is caused by a biological agent, incompetence and apathy toward those who were initially affected by AIDS allowed the spread of the disease to become much worse; AIDS was allowed to happen.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

'Trip the Light Fantastic' (L'Allegro),
'Every Dark Cloud Has a Silver Lining' (Comus),
'That Last infirmity of Noble mind' (Lycidas) and
'Look Homeward Angel' (Lycidas)

John Milton (1608-1674)

The Luck of Barry Lyndon

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)

The novels present a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.

Stieg Larsson

Known for his Millennium Trilogy, of course.

This story was the inspiration behind which classic 1987 American novel written by a Nobel Prize winning author?

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade. A survey of writers and literary critics conducted by The New York Times found Beloved the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.

Dr. Fu Manchu

The First Folio (collection of Shakespeare's complete plays)

Heminges and Condell were in a position to do this because they, like Shakespeare, worked for the King's Men, the London playing company that produced all of Shakespeare's plays (in Elizabethan England, plays belonged to the company that performed them, not to the dramatist who had written them).

The Dune series by Frank Herbert

Herbert's first novel in the series, 1965's Dune, is popularly considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, and it is sometimes cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

The story is based upon a black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, as well as the first play with a black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Which 1997 book is the author's attempt to answer this question?

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs and Steel met with a wide range of response, ranging from generally favorable to outright rejection of its approach. In 1998 it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Royal Society's Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe

The story was cinematically adapted in 1962 with Sillitoe writing the screenplay and Tony Richardson directing.

This unforgettable opening line is from which author's A Bend in the River and lent itself to the title of that authors authorized biography The World Is What It Is by Patrick French?

V.S. Naipaul

It was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the Times' 10 Best Books of 2008.

Italo Calvino

Mario Vargas Llosa

Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards the right.

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

They describe a "Gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower whose nature the books call both physical and metaphorical. King has described the series as his magnum opus.

Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot

The drama portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

Paris

The original bookstore's proprietor was Sylvia Beach. Between 1919 and 1941, the store was considered to be a center of Anglo/American literary culture in Paris. The shop was often visited by artists of the "Lost Generation," such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, George Antheil, Man Ray and James Joyce. The contents of the store were considered high quality and reflected Beach's own literary taste.

Flash (Gordon)

At the time, the predominant meaning of "flash" was "showy", connoting dishonesty.

Pyramus and Thisbe

The tale is told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

The Horla

The story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's own The Call of Cthulhu, which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity.

Curious George (the king was George VI)

In each of the books, Curious George is identified in the text as a monkey, though in the illustrations he does not correspond exactly to any non-fictional species of monkey (and has more of the characteristics of an ape, especially a chimpanzee, which does not possess a tail, as does a monkey). George is brought from his home in Africa by "The Man with The Yellow Hat" to live with him in a big city.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

It tells the story of his childhood in Brooklyn and Ireland.

The phrase refers to Eichmann's deportment at his trial, displaying neither guilt nor hatred, claiming he bore no responsibility for shipping Jews to their deaths because he was simply "doing his job."

Banality of Evil

Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker.

Rodomontade (from Rodomonte)

He is the King of Sarza and Algiers and the leader of the Saracen army which besieges Charlemagne in Paris.

Jean M. Auel

The books focus on the period of co-existence between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) is the first novel in the series that is set in Europe.

Edgar Allan Poe

Difficulty in finding literary success early in his short story-writing career inspired Poe to pursue writing a longer work. A few serialized installments of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were first published in the Southern Literary Messenger, though never completed. The full novel was not published until July 1838 in two volumes. Contemporary critics responded negatively to the work for being too gruesome and for cribbing heavily from other works. Poe himself later called it "a very silly book". Nevertheless, it became an influential work, notably for Herman Melville and Jules Verne.

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Black Like Me

In 1959, at the time of the book's writing, race relations were particularly strained in North America; Griffin's aim was to explain the difficulties facing black people in certain areas. To expedite this, under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.

Love's Labour's Lost

Things Fall Apart (1958)

Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart, and Arrow of God (1964), on a similar subject.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The lyrics describe a shooting on a beach, in which the Arab of the title is killed by the song's narrator; in Camus' story the main character, Meursault, shoots an Arab standing on a beach after staring out at the sea and being overwhelmingly blinded by the sun, reflected on the sea, the sand and the knife the Arab was holding. The track has a controversial history, since it has often been viewed as promoting violence against Arabs.

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)

The Theory of the Leisure Class

In the book, Veblen argues that economic life is driven not by notions of utility, but by social vestiges from pre-historic times. Drawing examples from his time (turn-of-the-Twentieth Century America) and anthropology, he held that much of today's society is a variation on early tribal life. According to Veblen, beginning with primitive tribes, people began to adopt a division of labor along certain lines. The "higher-status" group monopolized war and hunting while farming and cooking were considered inferior work.

Gulliver's Travels

A runcible spoon

Lear does not appear to have had any firm idea of what the word "runcible" means. His whimsical nonsense verse celebrates words primarily for their sound, and a specific definition is not needed to appreciate his work. However, since the 1920s (several decades after Lear's death), modern dictionaries have generally defined a runcible spoon to be a fork with three broad curved prongs and a sharpened edge, used with pickles or hors d'oeuvres, such as a pickle fork.

Ozymandias

Ozymandias was another name for Ramesses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. The poem is frequently anthologized and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem.

Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825)

He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His expurgation was the subject of some criticism and ridicule and, through the eponym bowdlerise (or bowdlerize), his name is now associated with censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programmes.

Salad days

More modern use, especially in the United States, refers to a person's heyday when somebody was at the peak of his/her abilities—not necessarily in that person's youth.

Three Billy Goats Gruff

Penguin Island

The longest chapter and probably most well known is a satire of the Dreyfus affair.

Richard Matheson

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

It was first published by Random House on January 22, 1990, making it his last book published before his death. It is perhaps best known for the refrain, "Will you succeed? Yes, you will indeed. (98 3/4% guaranteed.)"

J.G. Ballard (1930-2009)

The controversial Crash is an exploration of sexual fetishism connected to automobile accidents, and the loosely autobiographical Empire of the Sun is about his childhood internment by the Japanese during World War II after the invasion and conquest of Shanghai, where Ballard was born in the International Settlement. Both books were adapted into films, by David Cronenberg and Stephen Spielberg respectively.

The Elements of Style

E.B. White is best known as the author of children's books Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little.

"................................................
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."?

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

This is the Keats poem Endymion which he based on the Greek myth of the shepherd Endymion who was beloved by the moon goddess Selene.

W.H. Auden

Akira

It was initially serialised in the pages of Young Magazine from 1982 until 1990 and the work was collected in six volumes. An identically titled anime film adaptation was released in 1988.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans

Reading Lolita in Teheran by Azar Nafisi

The title is an indirect reference to the Islamic state, which took power in 1979 and soon afterward lowered the marriage age for boys and girls.

Carlos Castenada (1925-1998)

The books and Castaneda, who rarely spoke in public about his work, have been controversial for many years.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

In Russia before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, landowners were entitled to own serfs to farm their land. Serfs were for most purposes considered the property of the landowner, and could be bought, sold, or mortgaged against, as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general), the measure word "soul" was used: e.g., "six souls of serfs". The plot of the novel relies on "dead souls" (i.e., "dead serfs") which are still accounted for in property registers.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

The Moon and Sixpence

Based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, it is told in episodic form by the first-person narrator as a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character, Charles Strickland, a middle aged English stock broker who abandons his wife and children abruptly in order to pursue his desire to become an artist. Presumably Strickland's "moon" is the idealistic realm of Art and Beauty, while the "sixpence" represents human relationships and the ordinary pleasures of life.

The comic book industry

It led to the creation of Comics Code Authority. At the height of its influence, it was a de facto censor for the U.S. comic book industry. The CCA had no legal authority over other publishers, but magazine distributors often refused to carry comics without the CCA's seal of approval.

Prince Edward VI (son of Henry VIII of England)

Though not as popular among critics as Twain's other works, the book has foreshadowed the author's successful forays into historical fiction with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land

Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem – its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures – the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and the Sanskrit "Shantih shantih shantih" (its last line).

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Jeffrey Archer

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

It covers their cross country road trip, as well as the Acid Tests (a series of psychedelic parties held by Ken Kesey in the San Francisco Bay Area during the early 1960's, centered entirely around the use, experimentation, and advocacy of LSD, also known as "acid"), early performances by The Grateful Dead, and Kesey's exile to Mexico. Wolfe is primarily concerned not with narrative, but with relating the Pranksters' intellectual and quasi-religious experiences.

Literary buffs should be able to immediately say what this alludes to. Can you?

The judgement of John M. Woolsey approving James Joyce's Ulysses

United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was a 1933 case in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dealing with free speech. At issue was whether James Joyce's novel was obscene. In deciding it was not, Judge John M. Woolsey opened the door to importation and publication of serious works of literature, even when they used coarse language or involved sexual subjects. The decision was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but it is Judge Woolsey's trial court opinion which is now often cited as an erudite and discerning affirmation of literary free speech.

The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

Hersey asked toward the end of the article: Why should [school primers] not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate — drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, "Dr. Seuss", Walt Disney? Dr. Seuss responded to this "challenge," and began work. His publisher supplied him with a list of 400 words, ones that the publisher thought children would be learning in school. His publisher told him to cut the list in half and to try and write an interesting enough book for children. Nine months later Dr. Seuss created The Cat In The Hat, which used 223 words from the list he was given.

William F. Buckley Jr.

Buckley wrote the 1976 spy novel Saving the Queen, featuring Blackford Oakes as a rule-bound CIA agent; Buckley based the novel in part on his own CIA experiences. Over the next 30 years, Buckley would write another 10 novels featuring Oakes. Buckley's primary intellectual achievement was to fuse traditional American political conservatism with economic libertarianism and anti-communism, laying the groundwork for the modern American conservatism of US Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and US President Ronald Reagan. He also founded the political magazine National Review in 1955.

P.G. Wodehouse

During WWII, Wodehouse made a series of radio broadcasts aimed at America (but not England) that the Germans persuaded him to make from Berlin. Wartime England was in no mood for light-hearted banter, however, and the broadcasts led to many accusations of collaboration with the Nazis and even treason.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

It also marks Irving's first use of the pseudonym "Geoffrey Crayon," which he would continue to employ throughout his literary career. The Sketch Book, along with James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, was the first widely read work of American literature in Britain and Europe. It also helped advance the reputation of American writers with an international audience.

Martin Heidegger

C.S. Lewis

However, so many friends recommended the book to Lewis as a method for dealing with his own grief that he made his authorship public. The book consists of the contents of four manuscript books in which Lewis expounds on his grief, from the everyday difficulties of his life without Joy to deep-set questions of faith.

The clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature

The word "samizdat" is made out of "sam" (Russian: "self, by oneself") and "izdat" (Russian: "publisher"), thus, self published. The term was coined as a pun by Russian poet Nikolai Glazkov in the 1940s.

Jack Aubrey

The twenty (and almost twenty-one) books in the Aubrey–Maturin series encompasses Aubrey's adventures and various commands along his course to flying a rear admiral's flag. Most of his naval battles and adventures are drawn from actual Royal Navy history; several of his exploits and reverses are directly based on the chequered career of Thomas Cochrane, one of the most daring and successful captains of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. O'Brian is said to have pictured his friend, actor Charlton Heston, as Aubrey.

William Shakespeare

He worked for as actor and playwright for most of his career in it.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

The book is divided into twelve sections named after the months of the year. Each section begins with a recipe of some sort, involving Mexican foods. The chapters outline the preparation of the dish and ties it to an event in the protagonist's life. The phrase "like water for chocolate" comes from the Spanish "como agua para chocolate". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_water_for_chocolate)

Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

She is of course most known for Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented portion of the American public. Silent Spring spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy—leading to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides—and the grassroots environmental movement it inspired led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson)

Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832–1899)

This widely-held view involves a significant simplification, as Alger's characters do not typically achieve extreme wealth; rather they attain middle-class security, stability, and a solid reputation — that is, their efforts are rewarded with a place in society, not domination of it. He is noted as a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals, even though his novels are rarely read these days. As bestsellers in their own time, Alger's books rivaled those of Mark Twain in popularity.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger)

The Kalevala

The Kalevala is credited with some of the inspiration for the national awakening that ultimately led to Finland's independence from Russia in 1917. The most famous example of the Kalevala's influence upon another author is most likely with J.R.R. Tolkien. He claimed it as one of his sources for the writings which became The Silmarillion.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevala)

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

The books' titles are taken from actual streets in Cairo, the city of Mahfouz's childhood and youth. He was an Egyptian novelist who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature and who managed to modernize Arabic literature. He is regarded as one of the first writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism.

The Road to Serfdom

Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system, the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group, which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal. Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved.

Haiku poetry

His poetry is internationally renowned, and within Japan many of his poems are reproduced on monuments and traditional sites.

The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari)

The Genji is an important fictional work of Japanese literature and numerous modern authors have cited it as inspiration. It is noted for its internal consistency, psychological depiction, and characterization. The novelist Yasunari Kawabata said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "The Tale of Genji in particular is the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature. Even down to our day there has not been a piece of fiction to compare with it."

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

The focus of the book is to provide the history of World War I from the declaration of war through the start of the Franco-British offensive that stopped the German advance through France. In addition, the book provides a brief history of the plans, strategies, world events and international sentiments prior to and during the war. The Pulitzer Prize nomination committee was unable to award it the prize for outstanding history because Joseph Pulitzer's will specifically stated that the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for history must be a book on American history. Instead, Tuchman was given the prize for general non-fiction.

Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

The money available was insufficient to support the project, so it was neglected for a time. That changed when his estate began earning significant royalties from the rights to Pygmalion once My Fair Lady became a hit. However, the Public Trustee found grounds to challenge the will as being badly worded. In the end an out-of-court settlement granted only £8600 for promoting the new alphabet, which is now called the Shavian alphabet.

Albert Camus

Shahnameh by Ferdowsi

Aside from its literary importance the Shâhnameh, written in almost pure Persian, has been pivotal for reviving the Persian language subsequent to the influence of Arabic. This voluminous work, regarded by Persian speakers as a literary masterpiece, also reflects Iran's history, its cultural values, its ancient religions (Zoroastrianism), and its profound sense of nationhood. This book is also important to the remaining 200,000 Zoroastrians in the world, because the Shâhnameh traces before the beginning of Zoroastrianism (Mithraism age) to the defeat of the last Zoroastrian king by Arab invaders.

Scarlett O'Hara

The Devil's Dictionary

Examples of the contents are 'Abstainer: A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.' and 'Congratulation: The civility of envy.'

A Room of One's Own

The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics.

Animal Liberation

Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to animals: he argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to feel suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. The central argument of the book is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that 'the greatest good for the greatest number' is the only measure of good or ethical behaviour. Singer argues that there is no reason not to apply this to animals.

A novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels". It contains a number of ideas which became common tropes of the genre: a large number of suspects, red herrings, a crime being investigated by talented amateurs who happen to be present when it is committed, and two police officers who exemplify respectively the 'local bungler' and the skilled, professional, Scotland Yard detective.

"..............................................
................................................
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."?

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment is a famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which takes its title from the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan dynasty.

Tommy and Tuppence

Unlike many other recurring detective characters, Tommy and Tuppence aged in time with the real world, being in their early twenties in The Secret Adversary and in their seventies in Postern of Fate.

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

It is set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. Arguably Forester's finest novel, it was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the Modern Library.

Plato's Republic

It is a perfect version of Republic wherein the beauties of society reign (eg: equalism and a general pacifist attitude), although its citizens are all ready to fight if need be.

Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)

He was born in Lebanon and spent much of his productive life in the United States. One of his most notable lines of poetry in the English speaking world is from Sand and Foam (1926), which reads : 'Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you'. This was taken by John Lennon and placed, though in a slightly altered form, into the song "Julia" from The Beatles' 1968 album The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album).

Sidney Sheldon

His TV works spanned a 20-year period during which he created I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70), Hart to Hart (1979-84), and The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), but it was not until after he turned 50 and began writing best-selling novels such as Master of the Game (1982), The Other Side of Midnight (1973) and Rage of Angels (1980) that he became most famous.

Carlos the Jackal

In the Trilogy Carlos is depicted as the world's most dangerous assassin, a man with international contacts that allow him to strike efficiently and anonymously at locations anywhere on the globe. His actual name (Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez) is used and details - a mixture of fact and fiction - are given about his upbringing and training, including the fictional account that he trained with Russian intelligence at Novgorod.

Oliver Mellors

The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Ilkeston in Derbyshire where he lived for a while. According to some critics the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues also influenced the story. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four-letter words, and perhaps particularly because the lovers were a working-class male and an aristocratic female.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The essential story revolves around the relationship between Gilgamesh, a king who has become distracted and disheartened by his rule, and a friend, Enkidu, who is half-wild and who undertakes dangerous quests with Gilgamesh. Much of the epic focuses on Gilgamesh's feelings of loss following Enkidu's death, and is often credited by historians as being one of the first literary works with high emphasis on immortality. The epic is widely read in translation, and the hero, Gilgamesh has become an icon of popular culture.

Hesiod

Hesiod's writings serve as a major source for knowledge of Greek mythology, farming techniques, archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping. He lived around 700 BC.

Ovid, Horace and Virgil

A Bridge Too Far (1974)

It details the ill-fated assault by airborne forces on the Netherlands culminating in the battle of Arnhem and was made into a major motion picture in 1977.

V.S. Naipaul

It was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier.

The Wretched of the Earth

It is Frantz Fanon's best-known work, written during and regarding the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial rule. As a psychiatrist, Fanon explored the psychological effect of colonisation on the psyche of a nation as well as its broader implications for building a movement for decolonization. It has become a handbook for political leaders faced with any type of decolonization and is still read in the Pentagon today as advice on dealing with the conflict in Iraq.

And Then There Were None

Ten people, each with a deadly secret, find themselves trapped on an island where they become the subjects of a cruel game played by a figure styling himself Mr. U. N. Owen ("Unknown"). They are killed according to an old nursery rhyme, Ten Little Indians.

Gothic fiction

Prominent features of gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets and hereditary curses.

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

Some of his most famous books were Main Street and Babbitt. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 — which he rejected — for Arrowsmith, a novel about an idealistic doctor. Elmer Gantry was the story of an opportunistic evangelist, if not an outright charlatan.

Picaresque

This style of novel originated in Spain and flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and continues to influence modern literature. Some modern novelists have used some picaresque techniques, as Gogol in Dead Souls (1842-52). Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) combined the influence of the picaresque novel with the then new spy novel. Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Svejk was the first example of the picaresque technique in Central Europe. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was consciously written as a picaresque novel, as were many other novels of vagabond life, such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is a picaresque novel as well.

Wide Sargasso Sea

It was named by Time as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)

James Joyce was referring to which literary character with the above words?

Robinson Crusoe

Nobel Prize-winning (2003) author J. M. Coetzee in 1986 published a novel entitled Foe, in which he explores an alternative telling of the Crusoe story, an allegorical story about racism, philosophy, and colonialism.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

It operated in the New City community area of Chicago, Illinois for 106 years, helping the city become known as "hog butcher to the world" and the center of the American meat packing industry for decades. From the Civil War until the 1920s and peaking in 1924, more meat was processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world.

The Wild Duck

Goneril, Regan and Cordelia

Native Son by Richard Wright

The birth of Kunta Kinte of Alex Haley's Roots

The First Folio

Its actual title is Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Printed in folio format and containing 36 plays, it was prepared by Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. Although eighteen of Shakespeare's plays had been published in quarto prior to 1623, the First Folio is the only reliable text for about twenty of the plays, and a valuable source text even for many of those previously published. The Folio includes all of the plays generally accepted to be Shakespeare's, with the exception of 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' and 'The Two Noble Kinsmen'.

Gore Vidal

Twenty years after its publication, Vidal changed the ending to what he had originally in mind, no longer having to defer to the wishes of his publisher, in The City and the Pillar Revised.

Edgar Allan Poe (X-Poe)

In 2010, for the first time since 1949, the Poe Toaster did not make his annual appearance at the grave.

The Red Pony

It is a book of four related stories published in 1937 and expanded in 1945. Each story focuses on Jody Tiflin, a 10-year old boy growing up on a ranch on the west coast of the United States.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Having his works translated into dozens of languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Critic and biographer Alistair Reid has stated that Neruda is the most widely read poet since William Shakespeare. In 1971, Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after several years of being overlooked for his political activism.

Stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, and is used chiefly in poetry or drama. The term was introduced to the field of literary studies from that of psychology, where it was coined by philosopher and psychologist William James.

Bloomsday

The day is a secular holiday in Ireland. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, and 16 June was the date of Joyce's first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

It has achieved the status of the archetypal modern African novel in English and is widely read. It was followed by two sequels, No Longer at Ease (1960, originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart), and The Arrow of God (1964), both featuring the descendants of Okonkwo and the problems they face under colonialism.

On War

It was written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife in 1832. Clausewitz integrates politics and social and economic issues as some of the most important factors in deciding the outcomes of a war.

Iago (Othello)

Iago is one of Shakespeare's most sinister villains.

Gerald Durrell (1925-1995)

He founded what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo (now renamed Durrell Wildlife) on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1958, but is perhaps best remembered for writing a number of books based on his life as an animal collector and enthusiast.

The Great Gatsby

Mephistopheles

The Day of the Jackal

As published in the Israeli press at the time, police investigators believed that the assassination was partially inspired by the book, and that Amir used it as a kind of "how to" manual.

451 degrees Fahrenheit is stated as 'the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns'

The novel reflects several major concerns of the time of its writing: what Bradbury has called "the thought-destroying force" of censorship in the 1950s, the book-burnings in Nazi Germany starting in 1933, Stalin's suppression of authors and books in the Soviet Union, and the horrible consequences of the explosion of a nuclear weapon.

Babar the Elephant

Rapunzel

To Kill a Mockingbird

The mockingbird is used as a recurring motif to symbolise innocence and victims of injustice throughout the novel.

George Smiley

Smiley is sometimes considered the anti-Bond in the sense that Bond is an unrealistic figure who relies on gadgets and is more a portrayal of a male fantasy than a realistic government agent. George Smiley, on the other hand, is quiet, mild-mannered and middle-aged. He lives by his wits and, unlike Bond, is a master of bureaucratic manoeuvring rather than gunplay.

The Leatherstocking Tales

Listed chronologically by story action, the books are: The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie.

Alex Haley for Roots

Haley claimed that the appropriation of Courlander's passages had been unintentional. He has been accused of fictionalizing true stories in both his book Roots and The Autobiography Of Malcolm X.

Boris Pasternak

Thomas Hardy

A limerick

The archetypal "man from Nantucket" is a recurring theme in limericks. This can be attributed to the many whalers who once lived on Nantucket and the popularity of the limerick genre in whaling culture.

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Clive Barker

Barker came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories which established him as a leading young horror writer. He has since written many novels and other works, and his fiction has been adapted into motion pictures, notably the Hellraiser series.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

On Kafka's death in 1924 Brod was the administrator of the estate and preserved his unpublished works from incineration despite what was stipulated in the will. He defended this course by saying that when Kafka asked him to burn his papers, he told him he would not carry out this wish; "Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand."

A Sound of Thunder

It was first published in Collier's magazine in 1952. The Locus Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections lists it as the first of the top ten most republished science fiction stories.

Poets' Corner

The first person to be interred there was Geoffrey Chaucer, whose burial in the abbey owed more to his position as Clerk of Works of the Palace of Westminster than to his fame as a writer.

J.D. Salinger

The Abbey Theatre

The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904 and, despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has continued to stage performances more or less continuously to the present day.

Robinson Crusoe

The story was probably influenced by the real-life events of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway marooned on a Pacific island (currently Alexander Selkirk Island, Chile) for four years.

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

The play contains many allusions to political topics, particularly anarchism and socialism.

Yukio Mishima

He is recognized as one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language. Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays as well as one libretto.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)

Lord Lytton was a florid, popular writer of his day, who coined such phrases as "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", and the infamous incipit "It was a dark and stormy night." in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. Despite the popularity in his heyday, today his name is known as a byword for bad writing.

King Solomon's Mines

Rider Haggard wrote the novel as a result of a wager with his brother, namely that he could not write a novel half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883).

Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)

The basis of her many projects and stories were the small animals that she smuggled into the house or observed during family holidays in Scotland and the Lake District.

Layla and Majnun

There were two Arabic versions of the story at the time.In one version, he spent his youth together with Layla tending their flocks. In the other version, upon seeing Layla he fell in a most passionate love with her. In both versions, however, he went mad when her father prevented him from marrying her; for that reason he came to be called Majnun Layla, which means "Driven mad by Layla". To him were attributed a variety of incredibly passionate romantic Arabic poems.

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey

The Lake Poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.

Gabriela Mistral

One of her most famous quotes is Su Nombre es Hoy (His Name is Today): “We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.”

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

The series is generally light-hearted, though it touches on serious issues such as domestic violence and clinical depression.

The Riddle of the Sands

It was one of the early invasion novels which predicted war with Germany and called for British preparedness. The plot involves the uncovering of secret German preparations for an invasion of the United Kingdom.

She was an English translator whose translations of nineteenth-century Russian classics introduced them on a wide basis to the English public

In 1893, shortly after a visit to Moscow and Petersburg during which she met Leo Tolstoy, she started translating Russian literature, which became her life's passion and resulted in English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Chekhov.

A giant marlin

Though the book has been the subject of disparate criticism, it is noteworthy in twentieth century fiction and in Hemingway's canon, reaffirming his worldwide literary prominence and significant in his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

It is often interpreted as "things are what they are". In Stein's view, the sentence expresses the fact that simply using the name of a thing already invokes the imagery and emotions associated with it.

Cat's Cradle

The novel explores issues of science, technology and religion, satirizing the arms race and many other targets along the way. Having turned down his original thesis, in 1971 the University of Chicago awarded Vonnegut his Master's degree in anthropology for Cat's Cradle.

Anton Chekov (1860-1904)

Chekhov is now the most popular playwright in the English-speaking world after Shakespeare; but some writers believe his short stories represent the greater achievement. Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story Errand about Chekhov's death, believed Chekhov the greatest of all short-story writers.

Walter Scott

Among the early critics of Scott was Mark Twain, who blamed Scott's "romantacization of battle" for the South's decision to fight the US Civil War.

Douglas Adams

He is best known as author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Which one?

The Lady or the Tiger by Frank Stockton

Did the princess save her love by pointing to the door leading to the lady-in-waiting, or did she prefer to see her lover die rather than see him marry someone else? That discussion hook has made the story a staple in English classes in American schools, especially since Stockton was careful never to hint at what he thought the ending would be.

Purgatory

Mata Hari

Bloomsbury Group

The group's contributions were primarily in the worlds of literature and art, although prominent economist Maynard Keynes also socialized with them frequently. The writers of the group included Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf.

Alfred Tennyson

Some other phrases by Tennyson that have become commonplace in the English language include: "nature, red in tooth and claw", "better to have loved and lost" and "My strength is as the strength of ten,/Because my heart is pure".

Robert A. Heinlein

In his fiction, Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok", "TANSTAAFL" and "waldo."

The Jungle Book and Kim

The junior movement is called the Wolf Cubs. These connections still exist today. Not only is the movement named after Mowgli's adopted wolf family, the adult helpers of Wolf Cub Packs adopt names taken from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader who is called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and he remains today its youngest-ever recipient.

Waiting for Godot

These are the two primary characters in the play. Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, written in the late 1940s and first published in 1952. It originally received widely varied reactions from critics, and was seen as deliberately obscure, with Beckett himself resolutely refusing to aid interpretation by saying, "It means what it says."

Wole Soyinka

He is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright and some consider him Africa's most distinguished playwright. Soyinka has played an active role in Nigeria's political history. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal Government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring parties.

Moby Dick

The novel describes the voyage of Captain Ahab, who leads his crew on a hunt for the great whale. The book's language is highly symbolic, and many themes run throughout the work and the novel is often considered the epitome of American Romanticism.

The Catskills

The story is a close adaptation of Peter Klaus the Goatherd by J.C.C. Nachtigal, which is a shorter story set in a German village. The choice of "Van Winkle" for the character's name may have been influenced by the fact that Irving's New York publisher was C. S. Van Winkle.

What magnificent adventures follow?

X is Sindbad and he proceeds to narrate his seven voyages

The Arabian Nights, the collection of stories in which the cycle of Sinbad is found, takes the form of tales told by the beautiful maiden Scheherazade over a period of a thousand and one nights. At the close of the 536th night, Scheherazade gives the setting for the tales of Sinbad.

The Panchatantra

Literally 'Five Principles', it is a collection of originally Indian animal fables in verse and prose. The original Sanskrit work, now long lost, and which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BCE, is attributed to Vishnu Sarma.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

The novel was published in 1988, and on Feb 14, 1989, Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to execute all those involved in the publication of the novel.