Tag Archives: fiction/literature

Battle of Lepanto

“Battle of Lepanto: A naval engagement in the Gulf of Corinth on October 7, 1571, fought between the forces of the Ottoman Empire and those of a holy league comprising Spain, Venice, and the papacy. Under the leadership of Don John of Austria, the Christians overwhelmingly defeated the Turks, ending their naval domination of the Mediterranean. Cervantes took part in the battle and was wounded in the left hand.”

It is the subject of a poem by G.K. Chesterton.

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Mot Juste

“Mot Juste (mo zhust): The perfect, fitting word or phrase; precisely apt expression. Plural: mots justes.

‘It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste—the one and only correct word to use—the man who had taught me to distrust certain adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.’

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”

“An elegy on the death of President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) by the US poet Walt Whitman (1819-92), published in 1865-6 and incorporated into Leaves of Grass in 1867. Lincoln was assassinated on the evening of 14 April 1865, and died the following morning. It was lilac time.

‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,

And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,

I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.’

There is a musical setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra (1970) by the US composer Roger Sessions (1896-1985). The US writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) entitled one of his early collections of poetry When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (1973).”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

Rotten Rejections: Zane Grey

“The Last of the Plainsmen (1908)

I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.

Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)

It is offensive to broadminded people who do not believe that it is wise to criticize any one denomination or religious belief.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Term of Art: Affective Fallacy

“affective fallacy: A critical term denoting the confusion between what a literary work is and what it does. That is, a work should be judged solely on its literary components, not by its emotional (or affective) impact on the reader. It was first identified as a critical ‘error’ by Monroe Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt in The Verbal Icon (1954). It is related to intentional fallacy, in which a work is judged according to what the author presumably intended to say or in relation to the author’s biography.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Book of Answers: Zora Neale Hurston

“What did Zora Neale Hurston do before becoming a novelist? Hurston was a folklorist who studied with anthropologist Franz Boas at Barnard College. In Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), she compiled black traditions of the South and the Caribbean. Her novels include Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Rotten Reviews: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

“There is a certain cheapness, even and intellectual dishonesty, in pretending that the suburbanites…are pseudo-vertebrates who bend in the middle when confronted by the pressures of living their own lives.

New York Herald Tribune Lively Arts

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Ogden Nash on Children and Parents

“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”

Ogden Nash

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Term of Art: Analogue

“Analogue: A word or thing similar or parallel to another. As a literary term it denotes a story for which one can find parallel examples in other languages and literatures. A well-known example is Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, whose basic plot and theme were widely distributed in Europe in the Middle Ages. The tale is probably of oriental origin and a primitive version exists in a 3rd century Buddhist text known as the Jatakas; but the version usually taken to be the closest analogue to Chaucer’s tale is in the Italian Libro di Novelle e di Bel Parlar Gentile (1572) which is nearly two hundred years later than Chaucer’s story.”

Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Book of Answers: Plutarch’s Lives

“Who is featured in Plutarch’s LivesThe Parallel Lives (first century A.D.) pairs biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, such as the orators Demosthenes and Cicero. The book provided background for some of Shakespeare’s plays, including Julius Caesar.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.