Where was author Marguerite Duras born?

A 1939 novel called Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright (1872-1939) was written without using the letter e. The novel runs 267 pages and has about 50,000 words.

Shangri-La, the setting for James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon supposedly has a real-life counterpart in Hunza, Pakistan. The community, which boasts of having the healthiest people in the world, many over 100 years old, is located at the borders of Pakistan, China, and the Soviet Union.

These romances about life in Scotland were published anonymously by Sir Walter Scott under the credit “the author of Waverley.” The first book, Waverley, appeared in 1814 and helped to shift Scott’s career from poetry to fiction. The Waverley novels include: Guy Mannering (1815) Old Mortality (1816) Rob Roy (1818) The Heart of Midlothian (1818)…

Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz (1913-66), poet, fiction writer, and critic, was the model for Saul Bellow’s hard-drinking poet Von Humboldt Fleisher in the novel Humboldt’s Gift.

In Stendhal’s 1830 novel The Red and the Black, the red refers to Napoleon’s colors or the military life, the black to the clergy or religious life.

The alienated artist never discovered food that he enjoyed, so he starves to death in Franz Kafka’s short story “The Hunger Artist.”