All Questions

In Dolphins, what does the following line mean: "for the world will not deepen to dream in". I am unable to understand the usage of "dream in" Also, "out of love reflects me for myself" is ...

From 16 November 1942 onwards, Anne Frank had to share her room with the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, who had a number of habits that Anne couldn't stand. In the German biography Anne Frank (Reinbek bei ...

I would like to know what "advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back" means in the following sentences: She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most ...

I recently read Nalo Hopkinson's short story "Shift", which is freely available online. The central character is a reimagining of Shakespeare's Caliban, a Caribbean black man who finds white women to ...

What does "mannered whimsy" mean in the following passage taken from Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England by Sophie Read? Marvell does, it is true, come off better from this ...

I always thought that Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was anti-colonialism. Taylor Swift's "Wildest Dreams" song was filmed in Africa. The money the music video based on the song raised went out to ...

The earliest surviving diary by a poet is probably the Tosa Diary by the tenth-century Japanese poet Ki no Tsurayuki. More details about this diary can be found on the Diary Review blog. The Diary ...

I know that there are Red Dwarf books out there. Now my question is, how many Red Dwarf books are there? I personally only know (by seeing it) of 1 Red Dwarf book myself , but there could be more.

I just read the short story "Shift" by Nalo Hopkinson, which is freely available online. It's a modern, Caribbean-themed story inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest. One thing which confused me on ...

How to write a novel or a story about a single man and mostly around him or her without involving too many people? I am having problems in churning more than few pages and for years it is getting ...

I had a hard time understanding the logic behind Tyler getting fired. Here is the context: For three years Tyler had been doing film buildup and breakdown for a chain of movie houses. A movie ...

Books about literaty theory have a long tradition; Aristotle's Poetics dates back to the 4th century BC. Books about how to write literature also go back a long way, for example, Horace's Ars Poetica (...

I read (long ago!) a Rex Stout / Nero Wolfe novel in which Nero Wolfe describes what he thinks would be the perfect crime (i.e., a crime performed without any preparation just taking advantage of ...

At the end of The Island of Doctor Moreau, after the protagonist gets off the island, we see that he has developed a sort of revulsion towards other humans: Then I look about me at my fellow-men; ...

There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them. He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, ...

In the second half of 1943, Anne Frank received a children's bible from her father. Her older sister Margot objected to the idea of giving Anne a Bible on Hannukah, so her father thought giving it on ...

In the foreword to my copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Elizabeth Massie writes this: Victor Hugo's early novel, Notre Dame de Paris, published in 1831 and set in medieval Paris of 1482, was the ...

When Thomas Thorpe published Shake-speares Sonnets [sic!] in 1609, the sonnets (or at least a subset of them) had already circulated in manuscript for some time. Francis Meres already mentioned these ...

Near the end of the novel The Godfather, Michael Corleone takes his vengeance on the other families, as well as those who betrayed him. Before this, though, he cleans house, setting up a secret regime ...

In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are gaps in typesetting, which appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(...

While re-reading this Q&A, I was wondering how we know that, for example, the story "The Final Problem" is set in 1891. Presumably it's mentioned somewhere in the story. I recall the occasional ...

Jonathan Swift published Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships in 1726 as a satire on human nature. ...

While reading One to Count Cadence from James Crumley (first published 1969), I read this sentence: The name on the passport was Robert Jordon; it was a joke; nobody laughed. Despite searching ...

In 1838, the Flemish author Hendrik Conscience published the novel De Leeuw van Vlaenderen, of de Slag der Gulden Sporen ("The Lion of Flanders, or the Battle of the Golden Spurs"), which is based on ...

A long time I started a story but never finished it. Now I cannot find it because I forgot the author and title. I remember it being from a famous author but not his most famous work. The story ...

I am learning English and for that purpose (among other things) I want to read a few novels. I have made a list of novels selected by personal taste, but since I am still learning, I am afraid that ...

A long time ago I used to write poetry, and there was one particular stanza that has always stuck with me and seemed inherently rhythmic, but I’m not familiar with the relevant terminology and so I’m ...

It's difficult not to notice that the vast majority of heroes in Atlas Shrugged are unmarried and have no kids. Dagny Taggart - unmarried, no kids John Galt - unmarried, no kids Francisco - ...

What was the original price (first edition/first printing by Allen & Unwin, London) of The Lord of the Rings books when they were first sold in 1954/1955?

What does "layering of roles" precisely mean in the following sentence quoted from Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness by Anthony Francis Caputi? For the generation of Neveux, Jean ...

Currently I can only read with Chinese and English. So if his works are originally wrote in French, I may choose Chinese version.

From I Hight Don Quixote by Jack Parsons: They said I was crazy, ambiguous, lazy, disgusting, fantastic, obscene; So I hied for my sagebrush and cactus and corn mush, To see if the air was ...

After her supposed death in the beginning of Piercing the Darkness, Sally Roe started writing to Tom Harris after learning about the bogus lawsuit against him. However, she puts her real name on the ...

Consider the following segment from Atlas Shrugged: "But I don't know what's wrong with it." The man sighed, bewildered. "I don't know what to do." "It's the vibrator that's out of order," ...

Sonnet 90 by Shakespeare: Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now; Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross, Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow, And do not drop in for an ...

There is a quote about travel attributed to the writer Paul Theroux: "Travel is glamorous only in retrospect." This quote is used by a lot of writers on the Internet, but there is no citation ...

There is a quote about travel attributed to the writer Paul Theroux: "Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going." It shows up on web sites like Goodreads and ...

The book Beast and Man in India by John Lockwood Kipling (father of the more famous Rudyard Kipling), which is freely available on Project Gutenberg, has the following cryptic dedication: TO THE ...

McWhorter, J. PhD Linguistics (Stanford). The Power of Babel (2003). p. 24 Middle.   Russian is such a case, and it creates little ripples of semantic ambiguity in translations. In his ...

Besides the book “After man” & “Man after man” has anyone ever made up stories based upon such creations, either homemade or otherwise? I mean featuring rabbucks, predatory rats, maybe night ...

Harry Mulisch prefaces his novel De aanslag (The Assault) with a quote from C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus, i.e. Pliny the Younger: Overal was het al dag, maar hier was het nacht, neen, meer dan ...

"Halted", "Fed" and "Eased" from first stanza of "Spring Offensive" by Wilfred Owen. Halted against the shade of a last hill They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease; And, finding comfortable ...

After he developed a number of highly successful buildings, Guy Francon was established enough in his reputation that he no longer had to do much actual design work on his own. Peter Keating privately ...

I'm struggling to find a poem by Simon Armitage where he goes on a tour about him in disguise only to find that the tour guide doesn't know much about him. What was its name and what collection is it ...

In Chapter XXXIII of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom explains "ransom" to Huck. But in Chapter II of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom has no idea what ransoming is. Is this just Twain ...

I've come accross the expressions 'putter, putter!' and 'chop, chop' in the novel 'The Arrangement' by Elia Kazan. I need interpretation. Here is the paragraph: He'd continue his joking, fixing me ...

So I recently watched a performance of Ruddigore and later read that the second act was almost completely redone and that the overture was changed. However, I cannot seem to find anything regarding ...

In a recent discussion in an online literature course, someone thought that the young woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and the character Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf'...

John McWhorter PhD Linguistics (Stanford). Words on the Move (2016). p. 86. Emboldening mine.   Commonly we are told that Shakespeare's language is "high," such that the challenge can be met by ...

In a recent discussion in on online course about How to Read a Novel, someone suggested that Winston Smith in Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is an unreliable narrator. L. Kip Wheeler's glossary ...