The Body in the Library Trivia Quiz

An autobiography, "BRAIN on Fire: My Month of Madness" was released in 2012. Following "New York Post" writer Susannah Cahalan's experiences with encephalitis, the story she writes follows not only her diagnosis, but also her history of doctors' visits, her time in treatment, and her learnings of a disease long misunderstood by the medical community. Cahalan would become one of only a couple hundred people, at the time, to receive her specific diagnosis.

"Brain on Fire" would be adapted for film and released as a Netflix exclusive in 2018. The movie starred Chloë Grace Moretz in the role of Susannah Cahalan and followed her decline in health, the discovery of her ailment, and her recovery.

Her debut novel, Toni Morrison's "The Bluest EYE" is one of her most-challenged works in the United States, mostly due to the taboo and difficult contents of the book in which a post-Depression-era African-American girl struggles with her identity. 'The bluest eye' refers to the standard of beauty that the focal character of the novel, Pecola, believes she sees when she envisions white America, especially when held to the standards imposed by racism experienced in her life in Ohio.

Toni Morrison would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for her body of work to date. She would continue writing into the 2010s, filling out a bibliography of eleven novels, multiple children's books, and several plays and non-fiction writings. Her novel, "Beloved", was adapted to the screen in 1998 and, as it starred Oprah Winfrey, it significantly reinvigorated discourse about her works at the turn of the century. She passed away in 2019 at the age of 88, leaving behind an important legacy in American fiction.

Published in 1836, Nikolai Gogol's short story "The NOSE" was released in an Alexander Pushkin publication, "Sovremennik"; Pushkin reached out to Gogol specifically to aid him in his fledgeling venture as the world shifted from Romantic Era writings into the Victorian Era.

The story is a silly one. A man's nose removes itself from his face in the middle of the night and the man awakens to pursue it through the city of Saint Petersburg. Often, the nose manages not only to disguise itself as a successful member of society, but flee and evade capture on multiple occasions. Eventually, the man falls asleep and the nose returns as though nothing happened.

Well-regarded in its era, the story has been the topic of critique and analysis for centuries, especially in regards to Gogol's commentary on social standings and societal expectations in his day. On the surface, however, it's still a story about a nose gone rogue... at least for a little bit.

Though the film adaptation is probably significantly more popular, Peter Benchley's 1974 novel, the basis for the movie, ended up being quite popular. Simply titled "JAWS", the story involved the town of Amity, found on Long Island, being plagued by the presence of a great white shark on its beaches and off its coast. Inevitably, a handful of the book's main characters headed out onto the water to put an end to the menace...with great suspense!

Of course, the film for "Jaws", the debut motion picture from Steven Spielberg, would go on to be the first cinematic 'blockbuster', as it was called. The producers of the movie bought the rights to the story before it even hit the shelves. The movie was, then, the highest-grossing of all time; the book subsequently sold millions of copies in its first years, spending almost all of 1974 on the bestseller charts.

The debut novel of British author Zadie Smith, "White Teeth" released to stores in 2000 and quickly became one of the go-to award-winning novels of the 21st century, topping booklists and bestseller charts.

Following the stories and lives of London friends Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, the novel recounts their history together, serving as tank operators at the end of WWII and returning to their distinctly different lives in post-war England. Over decades, their backgrounds and their stories intermingle and intersect in understandably complex ways.

Zadie Smith would continue to find significant success in fiction writing both in the short form (with many short stories being published in "The New Yorker") and longer stories. Her 2005 novel "On Beauty" was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Released as a serial in 1899, just as the Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution wound to a close, Joseph Conrad's "HEART of Darkness" ushered in the era of Modernism in international literature, pulling a curtain back on European colonialism with a tale set in the Congo as his protagonist, Charles Marlow, navigates the unexplored African river on the hunt for Mr. Kurtz. What he found was nothing short of perspective-changing.

"Heart of Darkness" would go on to form the basis of the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola movie "Apocalypse Now", set during the Vietnam War. It would win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and end up nominated for eight Oscars.

Joseph Conrad, meanwhile, would write no small amount of fiction well into the twentieth century with "Lord Jim" and "Nostromo" being of particular note. His works were greatly influential and highly-regarded amongst his contemporaries, making him one of the foremost figures leading in the newness of the Modernist school.

One of the most famous works of fiction written about World War I, "A Farewell to ARMS" regards an American working as a medic on the Italian front and follows the series of events that befall him as he struggles to survive the calamities of war, escape capture by enemy forces, and return to a woman he falls in love with. Spread across five segments, the chronicle tracks his time on the front lines through to his war desertion.

Hemingway, famously also a war-time medic, is said to have based most of the novel on himself, using his own love letters as inspiration. The novel was far from his only success; he would become one of the most important figures in American literary history, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. "A Farewell to Arms" was his third novel.

Written by sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Left HAND of Darkness" was the fourth book in a series of writings known as 'The Hainish Cycle' in which Earth, amongst other planets, were created by an overseeing planet known as Hain. Le Guin was highly celebrated for her work, even in her day, at a time when science fiction and fantasy writers were predominantly men. "The Left Hand of Darkness" touched on heady themes like gender, sex, biology, and cultural understanding, but held up against extraterrestrial life.

Le Guin wrote numerous novels, short story collections, and non-fiction essays across more than half a century of professional writing, but she's perhaps best known for her science fiction achievements having won eight Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards. Aiding in a wave of twentieth-century science fiction, she's one of the best-selling female genre writers of her generation. She passed away in 2018.

One of the earlier Miss Marple mysteries (it was the third novel published in the series, after "The Murder at the Vicarage" and (hey-- quiz title!) "The Body in the Library"), "The Moving FINGER" is another classic tale of murder in which the reader is kept in suspense as the narrator and the characters within shift the suspect from one person to the other as new evidence is revealed. Miss Marple swoops in late in the book this time around to provide a thrilling conclusion and a fair answer as to who committed the crime.

Agatha Christie, of course, was the queen of the British mystery novel during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Her dozens of novels and short stories remained influential for decades after her death in 1976, providing classic templates for timeless tales of suspense and intrigue. "The Moving Finger" was her thirty-seventh novel, releasing in 1943.

The 1996 Canadian novel "Fall on Your KNEES", written by Ann-Marie MacDonald, was popular in Canada but hit its stride as a turn-of-the-century literary juggernaut when it was highlighted by Oprah's Book Club in 2002, bringing it back to the top of the bestseller charts. Before this, however, it passed through the Canadian awards circuit, getting shortlisted for the Giller Prize (and losing to Margaret Atwood's "Alias Grace").

The book, setting itself throughout the twentieth century, followed four generations of women in the Piper family as they experience difficult lives, tragedies, and divides that manage to connect and shape them all.

Ann-Marie MacDonald would follow the novel up with the well-received "The Way the Crow Flies" in 2003 and "Adult Onset" in 2014.