Moby Dick

Hans Christian Anderson, the creater of fairy tales, was actually word-blind. He was never able to spell correctly. His publishers had to correct his errors.

Donald Duck comics were once banned from Finland because he/it didn’t wear pants.

During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville’s timeless classic of the sea, Moby Dick, only sold 50 copies.

The song Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is a combination of an English poem “The Star” and a French tune “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman”. In the French tune, the original lyrics told the story of a girl telling her mother that she was being seduced by a man called “Silvandre”

The 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century

The Board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House, published its selections in July 1998.

1. Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (1916)
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1958)
5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)
7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961)
8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1941)
9. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence (1913)
10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939)
11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (1947)
12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler (1903)
13. 1984, George Orwell (1949)
14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves (1934)
15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)
16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser (1925)
17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940)
18. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1952)
20. Native Son, Richard Wright (1940)
21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow (1959)
22. Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara (1934)
23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos (1937—trilogy completed)
24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (1919)
25. A Passage to India, E. M. Forster (1924)
26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James (1902)
27. The Ambassadors, Henry James (1903)
28. Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell (1935)
30. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford (1915)
31. Animal Farm, George Orwell (1946)
32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James (1904)
33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1900)
34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh (1934)
35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (1930)
36. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren (1946)
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1927)
38. Howards End, E. M. Forster (1910)
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin (1953)
40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene (1948)
41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954)
42. Deliverance, James Dickey (1969)
43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), Anthony Powell (1975—series completed)
44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley (1928)
45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1926)
46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad (1907)
47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad(1904)
48. The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence (1915)
49. Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence (1921)
50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller (1934)
51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer (1948)
52. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth (1969)
53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
54. Light in August, William Faulkner (1932)
55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett (1930)
57. Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford (1950)
58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1920)
59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm (1911)
60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy (1961)
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (1927)
62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones (1951)
63. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever (1957)
64. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (1951)
65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham (1915)
67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1902)
68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis (1920)
69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (1905)
70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (1960—series completed)
71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes (1929)
72. A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul (1961)
73. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West (1939)
74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (1929)
75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh (1938)
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (1961)
77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (1939)
78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling (1901)
79. A Room with a View, E. M. Forster (1908)
80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow (1953)
82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner (1971)
83. A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul (1979)
84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad (1900)
86. Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow (1975)
87. The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett (1908)
88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1903)
89. Loving, Henry Green (1945)
90. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie (1981)
91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell (1933)
92. Ironweed, William Kennedy (1983)
93. The Magus, John Fowles (1966)
94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1966)
95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch (1954)
96. Sophie's Choice, William Styron (1979)
97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles (1949)
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain (1934)
99. The Ginger Man, J. P. Donleavy (1955)
100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington (1918)

The first book published is thought to be the Epic of Gilgamesh, written at about 3000 BC in cuneiform, an alphabet based on symbols.

Johannes Gutenberg is often credited as the inventor of the printing press in 1454. However, the Chinese actually printed from movable type in 1040. Gutenberg was unaware of the Chinese printing methods.

Sumerians invented writing in the 4th century BC.

William Shakespeare wrote his first play The Taming of the Shrew in 1593.

The first illustrated book for children was published in Germany in 1658.

The first novel sold through a vending machine—at the Paris Metro—was Murder on the Orient Express.

The largest web bookshop, Amazon.com, stores almost 3 million books.

When Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, he intended it as a satire on the ferociousness of human nature. Today it is enjoyed as a children’s story.

The Best-selling Novelist of All Time

Dame Barbara Cartland (7/1/1901 - 5/21/2000) completed a novel every two weeks, publishing more than 723 novels, which sold more than 1 billion copies in 36 languages, making her the best-selling novelist of all time.

The word millionaire was first used by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1826 novel Vivian Grey.

"The pen is mightier than the sword."
English novelist and dramatist Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873)

Orhan Pamuk’s Speech

Orhan Pamuk’s Speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 2006

Why do you write? This is the question I’ve been asked most often in my writing career. Most of the time they mean this: What is the point, why do you give your time to this strange and impossible activity? Why do you write... You have to give an excuse, an apology for writing... This is how I have felt every time I’ve heard this question. But every time I give a different answer... Sometimes I say: I do not know why I write, but it definitely makes me feel good. I hope you feel the same when you read me! Sometimes I say that I am angry, and that is why I write. Most of the time the urge is to be alone in a room, so that is why I write. In my childhood I wanted to be a painter. I painted every day. I still have that childish feeling of joy and happiness whenever I write. I write to pursue that old childish happiness and that is why for me literature and writing are inextricably linked with happiness, or the lack of it... unhappiness. In my childhood, I felt happy, painted a lot, and all the grown ups were constantly smiling at me. Everybody was gentle, polite and tender. I wrote all about this in my autobiographical book, Istanbul. After the publication of Istanbul, some people asked me this question: Aren’t you a bit young to write your autobiography? I kept my silence. Literature is about happiness, I wanted to say, about preserving your childishness all your life, keeping the child in you alive... Now, some years later, I’ve received this great prize. This time the same people begin asking another question: Aren’t you a bit young to get the Nobel Prize? Actually the question I’ve heard most often since the news of this prize reached me is: How does it feel to get the Nobel Prize? I say, oh! It feels good. All the grown ups are constantly smiling at me. Suddenly everybody is again gentle, polite and tender. In fact, I almost feel like a prince. I feel like a child. Then for a moment, I realize why sometimes I have felt so angry. This prize, which brought back to me the tender smiles of my childhood and the kindness of the strangers, should have been given to me not at this age (54) which some think is too young, but much much earlier, even earlier than my childhood, perhaps two weeks after I was born, so that I could have enjoyed the princely feeling of being a child all my life. In fact now... come to think of it... That is why I write and why I will continue to write. (The Nobel Foundation 2006)

Gothic Literature

The origins of Gothic literature can be traced to various historical, cultural, and artistic precedents. Figures found in ancient folklore, such as the Demon Lover, the Cannibal Bridegroom, the Devil, and assorted demons, later populated the pages of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Gothic novels and dramas. In addition, many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century works are believed to have served as precursors to the development of the Gothic tradition in Romantic literature. These works include plays by William Shakespeare, such as Hamlet (c. 1600–01) and Macbeth (1606), which feature supernatural elements, demons, and apparitions, and Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), which was written to support religion and discourage superstition by providing evidence of the existence of good spirits, angels, and other divine manifestations, and by ridiculing delusions and naive credulity. However, while these elements were present in literature and folklore prior to the mid-eighteenth century, when the Gothic movement began, it was the political, social, and theological landscape of eighteenth-century Europe that served as an impetus for this movement. Edmund Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) introduced the concept of increasing appreciation for the nature of experiences characterized by the “sublime” and “beautiful” by depicting and then engaging (vicariously) in experiences comprised of elements that are contrary in nature, such as terror, death, and evil. Writers composed Gothic narratives during this period largely in response to anxiety over the change in social and political structure brought about by such events as the French Revolution, the rise in secular-based government, and the rapidly changing nature of the everyday world brought about by scientific advances and industrial development, in addition to an increasing aesthetic demand for realism rather than folklore and fantasy. The Gothic worlds depicted fears about what might happen, what could go wrong, and what could be lost by continuing along the path of political, social, and theological change, as well as reflecting the desire to return to the time of fantasy and belief in supernatural intervention that characterized the Middle Ages. In some cases Gothic narratives were also used to depict horrors that existed in the old social and political order—the evils of an unequal, intolerant society. In Gothic narratives writers were able to both express the anxiety generated by this upheaval and, as Burke suggested, increase society's appreciation and desire for change and progress.

It is Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) that is generally acclaimed as the original work of Gothic literature—despite the fact that some of the Gothic trappings found in Walpole’s work were present in works such as Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753)—because in his narrative Walpole brings together elements of the supernatural and horrific, and models his ruined castle setting after his real-life residence, Strawberry Hill, a modern version of a medieval castle. The characters in the novel try to succeed in the modern world and to adhere to the optimism and forward-looking agenda they have been asked to advance, but a dark, ancient evil from the distant past dooms them to failure. While the literary merits of Walpole’s novel were challenged by many critics, the work inspired the reading public and authors alike, and works imitative of Otranto, written in what became known as the Gothic style, became extremely popular. Brother and sister John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, in their Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773), represent the intellectual and psychological mechanics of Gothic literature, and offer “Sir Bertrand, A Fragment”, a story written in Gothic style, to illustrate their assertions. Ann Radcliffe, like Walpole, is considered one of the founders of the Gothic genre. Radcliffe began her career as a Gothic writer with the publication of her well-received novel The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789, and quickly followed up with the novels A Sicilian Romance and The Romance of the Forest published in 1790 and 1791, respectively. Radcliffe’s 1794 novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is regarded by many as the quintessential example of eighteenth-century fiction at its finest, and it is for this work that she is best known. Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) is an example of the melodramatic popular “shilling shocker” or “penny dreadful” type of Gothic fiction, a debased imitation of Radcliffe’s style, characterized by gross excess and lack of literary skill, that was parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818). Parsons was one of many novelists, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton—held as an author of a more “elevated” or skilled example of the popular Gothic melodrama—who produced works of this kind. Other works considered classic examples of the Gothic novel are Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), both of which epitomize the stock Gothic character of the outsider or social outcast, who must face the consequences of committing mortal sin.

The great Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge also contributed to the Gothic tradition in literature and, according to critic Fred Botting, produced “major innovations, or renovations of the genre” that “drew it closer to aspects of Romanticism.” The Romantic writers, asserts Botting as well as other commentators, while utilizing the settings and devices developed by Walpole, Radcliffe, and others, focused and expanded upon the psychological, internal qualities of the protagonists, and dealt with such themes as the search for identity, desire versus duty, social alienation, and the search for truth. William Godwin and his daughter, Mary Shelley, are the Romantic writers most closely associated with the Gothic tradition. Godwin’s Things as They Are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) utilizes the Gothic tradition to indict political repression and protest the tyrannical rule of the day, while Shelley’s Gothic in Frankenstein (1818) urges personal integrity and social responsibility in an age of scientific progress and represents the anxiety produced by the disruption of the traditional, known natural world order.

While English writers are credited with founding the Gothic novel, Scottish writers such as James Hogg contributed heavily to the genre, and many English-language works were influenced by German literary traditions, particularly the works of such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Sir Walter Scott’s works reflect a German sensibility and works such as his Waverly (1814)—as well as the works of others, including Walpole, Radcliffe, Shelley, Maturin, and Lewis—in turn inspired Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper, some of the most notable authors who developed what became the American Gothic tradition in literature. In addition, the English Gothic tradition influenced French authors, including Gaston Leroux, and Russian authors, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov. Since its inception, the Gothic genre in literature has undergone numerous changes and adaptations, but its essential role as a means of depicting humanity’s deepest, darkest fears, and otherwise unspeakable evils—both real and imagined—has endured. (Quoted from www.enotes.com)

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of the English writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Carroll was born in Cheshire, England, on Jan. 27, 1832. As a young boy, puzzles, logic, and mathematics fascinated him and this interest continued throughout his life. His pen name, in fact, is an anglicized form of the Latin translation of his first and middle names, “Carolus Lodovicus.”

In 1855, while working toward becoming a priest, Carroll met Henry Liddell and his family, which included Alice Liddell, the young girl who provided the inspiration for both Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. By 1861, Lewis Carroll had already published a few volumes on mathematics and some short poetry. However, his most famous works were still ahead of him. He conceived of the Alice stories during a few boat rides with the Liddell children, when he would actually tell the stories aloud, making them up on the journey.

In 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was printed and it immediately became quite popular, providing Carroll with a substantial income. Six years later, he published Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

Over the next thirty years, Lewis Carroll wrote numerous other books, including The Hunting of the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno, in addition to some discourses on mathematics and logic, but none ever quite matched the appeal and popularity that his stories of Alice did.

Carroll died on Jan. 14, 1898, from complications of either bronchitis or pneumonia. (Quoted from www.enotes.com)

The First Novel in the World

In the year 1007, a Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote the world’s first full novel. Called The tale of Genji, it tells the story of a prince looking for love and wisdom. In its English translation it covers 54 chapters over 1,000 pages of text.

By the Middle Ages there were many novels about kings and heroic knights but in the late 1500s the anti-romance movement took roots and villains became the main characters. The first such novel was Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, written in 1554 by an unknown author. It is the story of a poor boy who makes his way in the world by tricking his employers.

The antinovel was invented by the French. Antinovel writers insist that traditional novels sketch a false appearance of the world in much the the same way as television soap operas do - or as Murasaki Shikibu did. Instead of creating fantasy plots and characters, antinovelists emphasize the minute details of life and the world.

The author who wrote the most novels ever also is a women. Dame Barbara Cartland (7/1/1901 - 5/21/2000) completed a novel every two weeks, publishing more than 723 novels, which sold more than 1 billion copies in 36 languages, making her the best-selling novelist of all time.

The Real Name

Abhishek Kumar Yadav (Annu)

Abigail Van Buren (Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips)

Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky)

Acton Bell (Anne Bront)

Adinegoro (Djamaluddin)

Alain-Fournier (Henri Alban-Fournier)

Alberto Moravia (Alberto Pincherle)

Ann Landers (Esther "Eppie" Pauline Friedman Lederer)

Alcofribas Nasier (Franois Rabelais)

Alexander Barks (Charlie Christensen)

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Franois Thibault)

Anne Rice (Howard Allen O'Brien)

Anne Knish (Arthur Davison Ficke)

Arkon Daraul (likely Idries Shah)

Ashida Kim (Radford William Davis)

Seiko Legru (Janwillem van de Wetering)

Barbara Michaels (Barbara Mertz)

Blaise Cendrars (Frdric Louis Sauser)

Bob Hart (Al Trace|Albert J. Trace)

Boris Akunin (Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili)

Boz (Charles Dickens)

Branislav Nusic' (Ben Akiba)

Cherry Wilder (Cherry Barbara Grimm)

Cherubina de Gabriak (Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva)

Christopher Hunter (Radford William Davis)

Clem Watts ([Albert J. Trace)

Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger)

Currer Bell (Charlotte Bront)

Curzio Malaparte (Kurt Erich Suckert)

Daniel Defoe (Daniel Foe)

Daniil Kharms (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev)

Danuta de Rhodes (Dan Rhodes)

David Axton (Dean Koontz)

David Michaels (Raymond Benson)

Dazai Osamu (Shuji Tsushima)

Dear Abby (Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips)

Douglas Spaulding ([Ray Bradbury])

Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel)

Edith Van Dyne (L. Frank Baum)

Edogawa Rampo (Hirai Taro-)

Edward Pygge (Ian Hamilton, Clive James, Russell Davies)

Edwin Caskoden (Charles Major)

El Hakim (Abu Hanifah)

Elia (Charles Lamb)

Elizabeth Peters (Barbara Mertz)

Ellis Bell (Emily Bront)

Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter)

Elsa Triolet (Elsa Kagan)

Emanuel Morgan (Witter Bynner)

Erich Maria Remarque (Erich Paul Remark)

Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan)

Francis Bennett (Edwin Keppel Bennett)

Franoise Sagan (Franoise Quoirez)

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

George Sand (Amandine Dupin)

Georges Courteline (Georges Victor Marcel Moinaux

Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Lippincott)

Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky)

H.N. Turtletaub (Harry Turtledove)

Hard Pan (Geraldine Bonner)

Harold Robbins (Harold Rubin)

Havank (Hans van der Kallen)

Herg (Georges Remi)

Hugh Conway (Frederick John Fargus)

Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg)

Irwin Shaw (Irwin Shamforoff)

Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz)

J.K. Rowling (Joanne Rowling)

James Dillinger (James Robert Baker)

James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)

Jay Livingston (Jacob Harold Levison)

Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter)

Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Hibbert)

Johann Joachim Sautscheck (Roman Turovsky-Savchuk)

John Beynon (John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris)

John Christopher (Samuel Youd)

John le Carre (David John Moore Cornwell)

John Wyndham (John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris)

Joseph Conrad (Jzef Teodor Na?e;cz Konrad Korzeniowski)

Korney Chukovsky (Nikolay Vasilyevich Korneychukov)

Keno (Eric Killinger)

Kinoysan (Ari Wulandari)

Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

Lorenzo da Ponte (Emmanuele Conegliano)

Louis-Ferdinand Cline (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches)

Mark Brandis (Nikolai von Michalewsky)

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie)

Michael Arlen (Dikran Kuyumjian)

Michael Innes (J. I. M. Stewart)

Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker)

Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins)

Nancy Boyd (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Natsume Soseki (Natsume Kinnosuke)

Nisa (Nicola Salerno)

Novalis (Friedrich Leopold)

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

Ogdred Weary (Edward Gorey)

Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton)

Pandir Kelana (R.M. Slamet Danusudirdjo)

Paul Annixter (Howard Allison Sturtzel)

Paul Celan (Paul Antschel)

Pedje (Purwadi Djunaedi)

Jean Ray (Jean Raymond Marie de Kremer)

Pauline Rage (Anne Desclos)

Peter Gast (Heinrich Kselitz)

Pierre Loti (Louis Marie Julien Viaud)

Piers Anthony (Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob)

Phillip Guston (Phillip Goldstein)

Publius (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, when writing The Federalist Papers)

Q (Arthur Quiller-Couch)

Remy Silado (Yappie Tambayong)

Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

Richard Leander (Richard von Volkmann)

Robert Jordan (James Oliver Rigney, Jr.)

Robert Markham (Kingsley Amis)

Romain Gary (Romain Kacew)

Rosemary Edghill (eluki bes shahar)

Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Lger Lger)

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

Sapper (H.C. McNeile)

Selasih (Sariamin Ismail)

Silence Dogood (Benjamin Franklin)

Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble)

Stash Cairo (Craig Hamilton)

Stefan Brockhoff (Dieter Cunz, Richard Plant, Oskar Seidlin)

Steele Rudd (Arthur Hoey Davis)

Student (William Sealey Gosset, discoverer of Student's t-distribution in statistics)

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton)

Sutan Iwan Soekri Munaf (Sutan Roedy Irawan Syafrullah)

The Fredman (Karl Mikael Bellman)

Thoinot Arbeau (Jehan Tabourot)

Titi Nginung (Arswendo Atmowiloto)

TM Maple (Jim Burke)

Toni Morrison (Chloe Anthony Wofford)

Vercors (Jean Bruller)

Vernon Sullivan (Boris Vian)

Umberto Saba (Umberto Poli)

Voltaire (Franois-Marie Arouet)

Walter (Henry Spencer Ashbee)

Willibald Alexis (Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Haring)

Woody Allen (Allen Stewart Konigsberg)

Yevegny Petrov (Yevgeniy Petrovich Kataev)

Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka)

Quotation

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. G.K. Chesterton (1874—1936)

Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood. William Shakespeare (1564—1616)

The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary. Franklin P. Adams (1881—1960)

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. H.L. Mencken (1880—1956)

A detective digs around in the garbage of people's lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage. Joe Gores

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. Honore De Balzac (1799—1850)

About Novel

The word novel originally derived from the Latin novus, meaning ‘new’.

The first novel, called The Story of Genji, was written in 1007 by Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu.

The first novel sold through a vending machine—at the Paris Metro—was Murder on the Orient Express.

Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel Gadsby has 50,110 words, none of which contains the letter “e”.

Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, 1899, into a wealthy, aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal politician, lawyer, and journalist. The household was Anglophile - Nabokov spoke Russian and English, and at the age of five he learned French. Nabokov received his education at the Tenishev, St. Petersburg's most innovative school. At 16 he inherited a large estate from his father's brother, but he did not have much time to enjoy his wealth. During the Russian Revolution his father was briefly arrested. The family emigrated to Berlin and Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1923. Vladimir Dimitrievich was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian monarchist.

Nabokov lived in Berlin for 15 years and worked as a translator, tutor, and tennis coach. He won acceptance as the leading young writer in the Berlin Russian community. Most of his readers were Russian émigrés—in the Soviet Russia his books were banned or ignored. In his early works Nabokov dealt with the death, the flow of time and sense of loss. Already using complex metaphors, Nabokov themes became later more ambiguous puzzles - he was a remarkable chess player—that challenge the reader to involve in the game. ''Readers are not sheep," he once wrote to a publisher, "and not every pen (pun) tempts them." In Lectures on Literature (1980) Nabokov wrote that to be a good reader one do not have to lean heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle, or belong to a book club. "The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance."

In Zashchita Luzhina (1930, The Defense) Nabokov took the role of a grandmaster and played with the expectations of his readers. The protagonist, Aleksandr Luzhin, is a chess phenomenon, who becomes a character on a giant chessboard. Luzhin finds it increasingly difficult to make transition from the world of the game to everyday reality. After suffering a mental breakdown, he recuperates slowly with the help of a young woman. Luzhin starts to believe that a cunning opponent is trying to manipulate the moves he makes in his life. He decides to throw himself out of a window and notices that the courtyard below seems to look like a giant chessboard. Luzhin is right: there is an opponent and he is Nabokov himself, who makes the point that the story is an artistic creation.

As a writer Nabokov gained his first literary success with his translations of some of Heine's songs. Nabokov's first novel, Mashenka (1926), was written in Russia. In 1924 Nabokov married Véra Evseevna Slonim, who came from a Jewish family; they had one son, Dmitri. Nabokov's early nine novels were published under the pen name Vladimir Sirin. These works included The Gift (1937-38), a novel and an intellectual history of 19th-century Russia, and Invitation to a Beheading (1938), a political fantasy, in which the remaining days in the life the central character correspond to the length of his pencil. Also Nabokov himself wrote everything in longhand. "I cannot type," he confessed in an interview in 1962.

When Hitler released the killer of his father, Nabokov moved to Paris in 1937. There he met the Irish novelist James Joyce. With a loan he received from the composer Rachmaninov, Nabokov moved three years later with his wife and son to the United States—he crossed the ocean on the Champlain, where he had a first-class cabin.

Nabokov taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University, delivering highly acclaimed lectures on Flaubert, Joyce, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others. He also continued his extensive researches in entomology, becoming a recognized authority on butterflies. He also held a modest but official position at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The job lasted until 1948. As a lepidopterist he was self-taught, but his attitude to scientific work was serious, not dilettantish. Especially he was interested in Blues, the tribe Polyommatini, found all over the world. Later Nabokov estimated that between the years 1949 and 1959 he traveled more than 150,000 miles on butterfly trips. His years at the museum Nabokov described "the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life." In his boyhood Nabokov had already made notes on butterflies and in 1920 The Entomologist had published his article 'A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera'. "My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting," Nabokov once said. Nabokov's first publication in English was an article titled 'A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera'. Changing language was not easy - ''What agony it was, in the early 'forties, to switch from Russian to English,'' he wrote in a letter in 1954.

Nabokov's first novels in English were The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947). The Atlantic and the New Yorker started to publish Nabokov's short stories in the early 1940s. In America, apart from collecting his shorter prose of the 1930s into one book, Vesna V Fial'te, Nabokov published only memoirs and verse in Russian. Conclusive Evidence (1951) was an autobiography, which was later revived as Speak, Memory (1966), set mainly in pre-revolutionary Russia. When the Australian critic and writer Andrew Field planned to write a biography on Nabokov, the answer was: "I told everything about myself in Speak, Memory, and it was not a very pleasant portrait. I appear as a precious person in that book. All that chess and those butterflies. Not very interesting."

It took six years before Nabokov finished Lolita, a literary bomb. The English writer Graham Greene cited it among the best books of 1955. Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster did not share his view. With Lolita, Nabokov gained a huge success, although it was banned in Paris in 1956-58 and not published in full in America and the U.K. until 1958.

Lolita is one of the most controversial novels of the 20th-century, in which the rhetoric of the protagonist both captivates and repels. The story deals with the desire of a middle-aged pedophile Humbert Humbert, the narrator, for a 12-year-old girl. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins," he starts his story. Humbert is said to be a metaphor for the writer and his art, and for the old world—Humbert is an European expatriate—encountering the new, represented by an American teenage girl, in all its vulgarity. Humbert keeps a prison-diary of his lifelong fascination with pubescent "nymphets". The first is Annabel Leigh, who dies of typhus, but then he finds Dolores Haze, his Lolita, in a New England town. She reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. During the course of the story, Humbert loses her to Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographic filmmaker. Humbert kills him and dies in a prison of a heart attack. Lolita dies in childbirth as delivering a stillborn daughter.

Stanley Kubrick's film version of the book was based on Nabokov's screenplay. "I knew that if I did not write the script somebody else would," Nabokov said, "and I also knew that at best the end product is such cases is less of a blend than a collision of interpretations."

Lolita allowed Nabokov to abandon teaching and devote himself entirely to writing. In 1957 Nabokov published Pnin, a story of a hapless Russian professor of literature on an American college campus. Pale Fire (1962) was an ambitious mixture of literary forms, partly a one-thousand-line poem in heroic couplets by John Shade, partly a commentary on them by a mad exiled king, Kinbote. "I can do what only a true artist can do," describes the mad Kinbote himself, "pounce upon the forgotten butterfly or revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things..."

From 1959, Nabokov lived in Switzerland, where his permanent home was at the Montreux Palace Hotel. He continued to collect butterflies, which after his death were stored at the Cantonal Museum of Zoology of Lausanne. Nabokov's later works include Ada (1969), a love story set on the planet of Antiterra, a mixture of Russia and America, Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1975), in which Nabokov's own life coincides occasionally with the protagonist's, also a writer.

The writer's son Dmitri has undertook the translation of several of Nabokov's books from these later years. Nabokov himself wanted to be valued more as an American writer than a Russian one. In the Soviet Union he perhaps enjoyed greater fame than in the West. Nabokov died in Lausanne on July 2, 1977. Among Nabokov's major critical works are his study of Nikolay Gogol (1944), and translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's masterpiece Eugene Onegin (1964), with commentary. The ten-year-long work was first brought out by the Bollingen Foundation in four volumes. (Quoted from http://www.kirjasto.sci.)

Facts

TYPEWRITER is one of the longest words that can be made using the letters only one row of the keyboard.

The words racecar, kayak, level, and Navy Van are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left and these are called palindromes. The longest palindromes in the dictionary however are the words 'Malayalam', 'rotavator', 'redivider'.

"Almost" is the longest word in alphabetical order.

The word avocado comes from the Spanish word, aguacate, which in turn is derived from the Aztec word ahuacatl, meaning testicle.

Vanilla derives its name from the Latin word for vagina.

Gymnasium comes from the Greek word gymnazein which means to "exercise naked".

For Your Eyes Only

James Bond 007 is handsome, tall, drives a fast car, has an unlimited expense account, and always gets the girl. That’s just the actor. The character he portrays also has a licence to kill.

James Bond debuted in Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale in 1953. The novel was adapted for television in 1954, featuring Barry Nelson as 007. The first Bond movie, Dr No, was released in 1962, starring Sean Connery. David Niven took the lead in a spoof version of Casino Royale in 1967; it is not recognised as part of the Bond franchise. Since Dr No, the equivalent of half the world's population have seen at least one Bond movie.

Sean Connery starred in seven Bond movies (including the “unofficial” Never Say Never Again in 1983), George Lazenby in one, Roger Moore in seven, and Timothy Dalton in two. Pierce Brosnan was issued his fourth licence to thrill in the 21th Bond movie, Die Another Day. Daniel Craig had his martini shaken, not stirred, in the 22nd Bond movie, a remake of Casino Royale. He will also kiss the girls in the 23rd (officially 22nd) Bond movie, to be called Quantum of Solace. All the 007 actors are over 1,8 metres (6 feet) tall.

In the 22 movies, Bond has 23 vodka martinis, 6 of which he orders himself but two of those he never receives. The rest are prepared and brought to him. Most surprisingly, in his 7 appearances as Bond, Sean Connery utters the phrase “shaken, not stirred” only once, in Goldfinger. In Fleming's novels, Bond drinks gin martinis instead of vodka martinis.

The Bond character was said to have been based on Dr John Dee, the very first British secret agent. Dee, who lived from 1527 to 1608, was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. He was a brilliant mathematician, magician, philosopher, alchemist, and astrologer. During his time, England was at war with Spain and fearing spies, Dee designed the 007 code for his correspondence with the Queen. The 2 zeros indicated "for your eyes only", and the 7 was a cabalistic or cryptic number. Dr Dee was not the only secret agent of the time. Seeing Spain amassing a new vast empire in the "New World" (the Americas), Queen Elizabeth secretly sent the pirate-turned-explorer Englishman Francis Drake (1540-1596) west with the added intent to harass the Spanish. It is known that Dr Dee and Drake actually met to discuss strategies.

However, Fleming explained the creation of Bond: "I extracted the Bond plots from my wartime memories, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain, and a heroine, and there was the book."

Ian Fleming (28 May 1908 - 12 Aug 1964) was attached to the British Naval Intelligence Division during World War II. After the war, Fleming purchased a patch of land in Jamaica and built a bungalow on it, calling it Goldeneye. It was here, in his forties, on 14 July 1952 that after three attempts the first words of the first Bond novel were created: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning."

The Bond name was simply borrowed from the author of Birds of the West Indies. The character M was modeled on Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence Division (NID), to whom in 1939 Fleming was made personal assistant.

In the novels, James Bond and Q actually never meet. Fleming wrote about Major Boothroyd and the Q branch but never mentioned a character called Q.

Author John Gardner took over the writing of Ian Fleming in 1981 with his first novel Licence Renewed. Sixteen years later he reliquished the 007 pen to Raymond Benson who debuted with Zero Minus Ten and ending with his last offering called The Man With the Red Tattoo in 2002. Three years on, Charlie Higson was awarded the challenge to depict the teenager Bond in a 1930s setting in a series of 5 Young Bond books, starting with Silverfin.

In the movies, Bond is told 35 times that he will die. He doesn't, of course. What he does, however, is make love 81 times: in a hotel room (20 times), London flat (2), at her place (15), someone else's place (2), on a train (3), in a barn (2), in a forest (2), in a gypsy tent (2), hospital (3), in a plane (2), in a submarine (1), in a car (1), on a motorised iceberg (1), in, around, under, or by water (25 times). Of the 62 Bond girls, 31 were brunettes, 25 blondes, and 4 redheads. Women moaned "Oh, James!" 16 times.

The Best Novels

According to the Modern Library, the three best novels of all time are (1) Ulysses by James Joyce; (2) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and; (3) Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) is often cited as the founder of the modern English novel. Defoe established principles for the genre that are still followed today. Those rules include a dominant, unifying theme, a strong thesis, and an attempt to depict reality.

Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) was the first writer to call himself a novelist. Though many of his contemporaries considered the form “lowbrow” writing and shied away from the title of novelist, Fielding embraced it.

Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) is often characterized as the greatest novelist of manners. Her books deal exclusively with the minutiae of upper-class society and landed gentry.

The History of Novel

The modern concept of the novel (a sustained work of prose fiction in one or more volumes) derives from the ancient Italian, novella, which means 'a work of the imagination grounded in reality'. Among the forerunners to the modern novel were the Satyricon by the Roman writer Petronius (first century A.D.) and The Tale of Genji by Japanese noblewoman Lady Murasaki (eleventh century). However, most scholars consider Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) to be the first true novel. The story represents the first extended prose narrative in which characters and events are depicted in a realistic manner. It influenced such works as Madame Bovary (1857) by French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), The Idiot (1868) by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) by Mark Twain.

Chairil Anwar

Indonesian writer who lived wildly and died young, but who had a deep influence on Indonesian postindependence poetry and prose. Chairil was the primary architect of the Indonesian literary revolution in both poetry and prose. He released poetry from the bonds of traditional forms and language, and his idealistic challenge, “I want to live another thousand years” have made him an artistic icon. With his energetic devotion to literature he is regarded as the principal figure of the Angkatan ’45 (generation of 1945) and one of the greatest poets of his country.

Anwar Chairil was born in Medan, East Sumatra, 1922, into a family which had moved to Jakarta. Nothing much is known about his parents. Chairil’s formal education was short. He attended elementary school and the first two years of a Dutch-language middle school in MULO. He began to write as an adolescent, before he moved to Jakarta in 1940, but none of his early poetry have survived. According to the author, he destroyed them. Among his earliest spared poems is “Life” from December 1942: “The bottomless ocean /is always banging,/ banging, as it tests the strength of our dikes.” (...)

In Jakarta he became the pioneering force among young writers and artist, the “Generation of ‘45”. Chairil served on the editorial board of one of the most important literary journals of the period, Siasat (Strategy), which appeared in 1947. Its cultural column, called “Gelanggang” (Forum), attracted a number of young writers belonging to the “Generation of ‘45”. Charil also was active in political and patriotic issues. The politically conscious literary and cultural movement, describing itself as the voice of the Indonesian revolution, identified with European modernism in the search for new literary forms and accents. From this generation emerged among others such writers as Pramoedya Ananta Toer , often called Indonesia’s greatest modern prose-writer, and Mochtar Lubis, a courageous political journalist and novelist.

The most celebrated work of fiction in Dutch by an Indonesian author was the novel Buiten het gareel (1940) by Suwarsih Djojopuspito. Bahasa Indonesia, a language which formally came to exist in 1928, became through Chairil’s writings a vital literary language. The earliest Indonesian novels were published in the 1920s. Pudjangga Baru (The New Writer) literary school, which was established in 1933, influenced greatly the development of literature. It advocated the idea that traditional literary forms had to be replaced by modern means of expression. Its founders and first editors were Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana and Armijn Pané, the brother of Sanusi Pané. Another movement, 45 Group, reflected the ideas of the independence struggle. It has been said that the difference between the Pudjangga Baru generation and that of 1945 was the difference between hope and impetuosity. Chairil Anwar and other its members tried to released the poetry from the bonds of traditional forms and literary language. Other important writers were Idrus, Surwarsih Djojopuspito, Achdiat Karta Mihardja, Toha Mochtar, Mochtar Lubis (imprisoned by the Soekarno regime for four years), Pramoedye Ananta Toer. The first Indonesian dramatist to gain wide recognition was Utuy Tatang Sontani (1820-1979). Poetry in Javanese since independence were dominated by St. Iesmaniasita and Muryalelana (b. 1932). In preindependence fiction in Sundanese the central figure was Mohamad Ambri (1892-1936). Liem King-hoo has been considered the finest Chinese-Indonesian novelist.

Chairil’s poetry is marked by his emotional and sometimes unconventional use of language. His works convey a powerful, vitalistic individualism; they have a strong sexual tension, as in the poem “Lagu Biasa” (1949). Chairil absorbed influences from such Western writers as Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and Dutch writers (H. Marsman and J.J. Slauerhoff). Although he had little formal education, he translated the poems of Rilke, Marsman, and Slauerhoff, and modelled his Indonesian poems on them. His own approach to writing he once described: “In Art, vitality is the chaotic initial state; beauty the cosmic final state.”

Among Charil’s most famous poems is “Aku” (1943), a cry for freedom and life (“Aku mau hidup seribu tahun lagi”). Another poem from this period is “Diponegoro”, the title referring to an early nineteenth-century hero of the Indonesian national struggle: “Better destruction than slavery/Better extermination than oppression. /The hour of death can be an hour of new birth: /To be alive, you have to taste living.”

During his lifetime Charil published only in periodicals, but there are several posthumous books, first of which were Deru Tjampur Debu (1949), Kerikil Tadjam, and Jang Terampas dan Jang Putus (1951). Chairil wrote fewer than seventy poems, some essays and radio addresses, and some fragmentary translations. He died on April 28, 1949, in Jakarta. Due to his influence, the developing Indonesian language attained equality with other languages as a literary medium. Chairil;s complete poetry and prose has been published in English in The Voice of the Night (1992), translated by Burton Raffel. (Quoted from www.kirjasto.sci.fi)