Literary Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Literature

by Alex Palmer

Overview

Packed with fascinating facts, Literary Miscellany is sure to please both professor and pleasure reader alike.

Wouldn’t it be great to be a fly on the wall as the great writers took pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)? While reading this work, you’ll be just that. Here are behind-the-book stories and facts about authors, publishing and everything literary that will entertain both casual and serious readers. Among the questions asked and answered:

 • When Did Literature Finally Get Sexy?
 • Is Coffee or Opium Better for Literary Creativity?
 • Why Are the Best Autobiographies so Embarrassing?
 • Why Do Some Detectives Use Their Minds and Others Their Fists?

Who knew that bestseller lists and children’s books could be the source of intense controversy? Or that even the biggest writers had to scrape by, with odd jobs and inventions like the Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrapbook? In Literary Miscellany, examine the trend of “fake memoirs,” with a list of who lied about what, and a rogues’ gallery of hoaxers dating back centuries. From epic poetry and Homer to pulp fiction and Harry Potter, Literary Miscellany, now available for the first time in paperback, is a breezy tour through the literature of today and yesterday, packed with enough interesting facts to entertain both the erudite professor and pleasure reader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781510772595
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	11/01/2022
Series:	Books of Miscellany
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	1,062,007
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Alex Palmer is a journalist and excavator of fascinating facts. He is the author of the original Weird-o-Pedia as well as books of surprising tidbits including Happiness Hacks and Alternative Facts. He is also the New York Times best-selling author of The Santa Claus Man and his writing has appeared in Lifehacker, Best Life, Mental Floss, Slate, and Esquire.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments x

Introduction xi

Great Openers xiii

Part 1 Writers

The lives, habits, and bizarre personalities of the greats

What Do Homer and Jay-Z Have in Common? 2

Bards and epic storytelling

How Did Starving Writers Pay the Bills? 9

The patrons, odd jobs, and odder merchandising of the masters

Is Coffee or Opium Better for Creativity? 19

Writers and their rotten habits

Why Are the Best Autobiographies so Embarrassing? 28

Humiliating confessions from St. Augustine to Augusten Burroughs

Why Couldn't F. Scott Fitzgerald Write a Decent Movie? 35

Hollywood adaptations and why most novelists shouldn't quit their day jobs

Are Short Story Writers Less Mature Than Novelists? 42

Why size matters, and when a novella is really just a novel

How Do You Write the Great American (or British or French) Novel? 50

Writing habits of the greats

Part II Readers

Why audiences love, hate, or ignore the great works of literature

Can Big Book Sales Lead to Mass Suicide? 58

The history of bestsellers from John Bunyan to Dan Brown

Why Don't Today's Writers Have as Many Groupies as Lord Byron? 67

The rise and fall of literary celebrity

Did Robinson Crusoe Teach James Frey to Lie? 76

The long history of fake memoirs and literary hoaxes

Who's Afraid of Jane Austen? 83

Novelists' battle for respectability

When Does Book Burning Actually Help Free Speech? 90

The follies of censorship and its backlash

What Did Children Read Before There Was Children's Literature? 98

The battle for fun in kids' books, from hornbooks to Harry Potter

Part III Works

Literary styles and their surprising histories

Who Elevated Insults to an Art Form? 108

When authors attack (with invective and satire)

What Makes Something Ode-worthy? 116

The surprising range of the lyrical poem

When Did Literature Finally Get Sexy? 123

How Shakespeare and others slipped sex into their works

Why Is Satan the Greatest Bad Guy Ever? 131

Literary villains and why we love them

Why Did Romantics Love Terror (and Not Horror)? 139

Gothic fiction and ghost stories

Why Do Some Detectives Use Their Minds and Others Their Fists? 147

The crime-solving skills of Holmes, Marlowe, and more

What Other Uncontrollable Monster Did Dr. Frankenstein Invent? 156

The birth and spread of science fiction

Conclusion: Last Words 163

Selected Bibliography 166