Literature Trivia Questions VI

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In 1994, what author of "All Creatures Great and Small" was hospitalized after being attacked by a flock of sheep?

       a. David Sedaris
       b. James Herriot
       c. Nick Hornby
       d. PG Wodehouse


Three of these are South African writers. One is a South African runner known for racing barefoot ... and for Britain. Who is the odd person out?

       a. Athol Fugard
       b. Zola Budd
       c. Alan Paton
       d. Nadine Gordimer


For Frederick Forsyth, it was "of the Jackal", but for Nathanael West it was "of the Locust". What is it?

       a. Day
       b. Revenge
       c. Heart
       d. Range


For Thomas Mann, it was "in Venice", for Agatha Christie it was "on the Nile" and for Ernest Hemingway it was "in the Afternoon". What is it?

       a. Love
       b. Holidays
       c. Death
       d. Boating


EM Forster wrote about one with a view, and Virginia Woolf wrote about having one of one's own. What?

       a. A window
       b. A room
       c. A lover
       d. A beach


Having thoroughly annoyed the world's Muslims with "The Satanic Verse", who vexed its Hindus with "The Moor's Last Sigh"?

       a. Ari Behn
       b. Christopher Hitchens
       c. Salman Rushdie
       d. Irshad Manji


What book did William Peter Blatty write with the $10,000 he won from You Bet Your Life?

       a. Jaws
       b. The Amityville Horror
       c. The Exorcist
       d. Airport


Subtitled "A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather", what was the immodest title of Jincy Willett's 2003 novel, which includes the name of a prize first awarded at New York's Waldorf Astoria in 1950?

       a. Book-of-the-Month Selection
       b. Winner of the National Book Award
       c. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
       d. Winner of the Nobel Prize


Novelist Robin Cook has said, "If my books stop selling I can always fall back on" what other career of his?

       a. Rocket science
       b. Brain surgery
       c. Civic architecture
       d. Criminal law


In November 1910, after his sixth son died, he finally left his wife and his estate, but he caught pneumonia and died at the railway station of Astapovo. Ironically, one of his most famous creations died at a train station, too. Who was he?

       a. Leo Tolstoy
       b. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
       c. Boris Pasternak
       d. Alexander Solzhenitsyn


Ironically enough, what practically blind writer wrote "Eyeless in Gaza" and "The Doors of Perception"?

       a. HG Wells
       b. John Milton
       c. Aldous Huxley
       d. William Blake


In 1960, I stabbed my wife, Adele Morales, with a three-inch pen knife after an all-night party. She didn't press charges. Who am I?

       a. William Burroughs
       b. Truman Capote
       c. Norman Mailer
       d. Jack Kerouac


Which writer's firm, Charles L Webster and Company, published the memoirs of people like Ulysses Grant, but went bankrupt in 1894 after losing $200,000 on an automatic typesetting machine?

       a. Mark Twain
       b. Henry David Thoreau
       c. Charles Dickens
       d. Sir Walter Scott


What made the 2004 Nicholson Baker's novel Checkpoint, and the 2006 Gabriel Range movie abbreviated DOAP, so controversial?

       a. They were about assassinating George W Bush
       b. They suggested that Jesus married Mary Magdalene
       c. They were about world war against Arabs
       d. They graphically depicted sex with children


What Shakespeare character had no first name, although she was based on a real-life 11th-century woman named Gruoch?

       a. Lady Macbeth
       b. Desdemona
       c. Cordelia
       d. Juliet




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