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Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this ebook
When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? Which author's heart was purportedly eaten by a cat? One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia. Which author had the heaviest brain? What was the original title of 1984? Who made the first bouillon soup? What do 12 percent of all winners of the Booker Prize have in common? What didn't happen on Thomas Carlyle's famous wedding night? And, while we're at it, who wrote the first Western, and is there any link between asthma and literary genius? Sutherland's irreverent literary masterpiece illuminates every topic imaginable from author advances to Civil War literature to Victorian sex to odd things eaten by literary characters (think Patrick Bateman's girlfriend in American Psycho). Other fascinating insights include the fact that the number one title among American Civil War soldiers was Les Miserables. This is the ideal anthology of fascinating information and trivia for all book lovers.
Author
John Sutherland
John Sutherland is Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. He has published twenty books (including Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in 19th Century Fiction) and writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He was chairman of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
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Reviews for Curiosities of Literature
Rating: 3.2619048952380956 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
42 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very informative full of trivia about literature. Must read for literature aficionados.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Ragbag of literary (ish) anecdata. Slightly interesting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Basically a collection of anectodes about writers, books, and readership. Great tongue-in-cheek observations, though I believe most of the humor would be more appreciated by Book Lovers, if you know what I mean.
Book preview
Curiosities of Literature - John Sutherland
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