Writing – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about D. H. Lawrence

The life of D. H. Lawrence, told through five interesting pieces of biographical trivia

1. He wrote a story about Jesus Christ called ‘The Escaped Cock’. This story, also sometimes published under the title ‘The Man Who Died’, was summarised by Lawrence himself as follows: ‘I wrote a story of the Resurrection, where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can’t stand the old crowd any more – so cuts out – and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven’. In fact, the story ends with a last line that would be made more famous by another writer, Margaret Mitchell: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

20 Hilariously Odd Titles of Genuine Books

The funniest book titles from the world of publishing

Occasionally, when we lift our noses up from our dusty tomes here at Interesting Literature Towers, people ask us, ‘What’s the best book you’ve come across in your research?’ Okay, they don’t ask it all that often. Picking a best book would prove difficult (though we’ve compiled some of our favourite book recommendations here), but probably the one that’s made us laugh the most is Bizarre Books, a compendium of downright ridiculous but genuine books and their laughable titles. The sort of books that will make you wonder how they ever got published, and who thought the title might be a good idea (though to be fair, some of them have been the victim of language changes which the original publishers could not have foreseen – Grimm’s Tales Made Gay, for instance). Edited by Russell Ash and Brian Lake, Bizarre Books is a hilarious history of the weird world of publishing in all manner of fields – food, fiction, children’s books, celebrity memoir, entomology, sex, and much else besides – all told through that simplest and most revealing of things, book titles. Here are 20 of our favourite funny book titles mentioned in Bizarre Books.

Five Fascinating Facts about Daniel Defoe

Fun facts about Daniel Defoe, one of Britain’s first novelists

1. He was born Daniel Foe. The French ‘De’ was a later affectation. Daniel Foe was born in around 1660, though the exact date is unknown. He lived through the Great Plague of 1665, an event he would later document in a work of part-fiction, part non-fiction, his Journal of the Plague Year. During the Great Fire of London a year later, in 1666, Defoe was almost caught up in the blaze: of all the houses in his neighbourhood, only Defoe’s and two other houses remained standing.

A Short Analysis of John Donne’s ‘Death, Be Not Proud’

A brief summary and analysis of one of John Donne’s classic Holy Sonnets

The sonnet ‘Death, be not proud’ is one of the most famous ‘holy sonnets’ written by John Donne (1572-1631). What follows is the poem, followed by a short introduction to it, including an analysis of its more interesting imagery and language.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Five Fascinating Facts about Noah Webster

Interesting facts about the life and work of the American lexicographer, Noah Webster

1. He was great-uncle to a very famous poet. Noah Webster was the great-uncle of none other than the poet T. S. Eliot. It may not be stretching things too much, in fact, to say that Eliot shared his great-uncle’s fondness for precision, especially when it came to defining words, and even more especially when it came to defining the names we give to important concepts. ‘Can “Education” Be Defined?’ was the title of one of Eliot’s lectures, in 1950. Fittingly, in the same lecture Eliot remarked, ‘people have been very far from agreeing upon a definition of the word “definition”.’ His great-uncle had made definitions his bread-and-butter.