Interesting William Gibson facts 1. William Gibson popularised the term ‘cyberspace’ in a short story of 1982. Defined as ‘the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs’, cyberspace first appeared in fiction in William Gibson’s 1982 story ‘Burning Chrome’ (no relation to Google Chrome, we’re told), a story about […]
Classic book titles that allude to other literary works Everyone knows that Aldous Huxley ‘borrowed’ the title of his best-known novel Brave New World from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Similarly, it’s well-known that Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls takes its title from a sermon by John Donne. But sometimes […]
The best facts about French literature French literature has often been one step ahead of the literary curve, to risk mixing our progressive metaphors. Before T. S. Eliot and other Anglophone poets had found a way to write about the modern city, Charles Baudelaire had already shown a way forward. […]
Curious facts about the diarist Samuel Pepys 1. Samuel Pepys’ celebrated diary was only deciphered in the early nineteenth century, over a century after his death. The diary wasn’t written in code but in a form of shorthand called tachygraphy. It took a reverend several years to decipher the diary – […]
Interesting trivia about American writers and their work As it’s Independence Day, how about some facts about the great and the good from American literature, from Edgar Allan Poe to Toni Morrison? What follows is a compilation of our 25 favourite facts about American authors and their writing. Edgar Allan […]