In "Tumor" book, by Anna Leahy, the author was writing a poet about her mother's cancer death, with the title "Gravity 2", after she had written a poet about her father's death, with the title "Gravity 1": She falls with the weight of herself and her unsteady state, a state of un-being. A moment...

One of the recurring elements or motifs in Theodor Fontane's novel Effi Briest is that of the Chinaman. The Chinaman is a source of fear for Effi, something like a phantom. References to him are particularly frequent in chapters 6–22 and appear absent in chapters 28–36. The motif is used too freq...

The Ramakien is a Thai version of the Ramayana. The earliest stages of the Ramayana seem to date from the 7th to 4th centuries BCE, and many other cultures that were influenced by India developed their own version. According to the Wikipedia article about the Ramakien, the epic was "adopted" in t...

Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013) was probably the most famous—or infamous—German literary critic of the second half of the twentieth century. From 1988 to 2001, Reich-Ranicki hosted the literary talk show Das Literarische Quartett on ZDF (a German public-service television broadcaster). He was kn...

Lazarillo de Tormes, published simultaneously in Alcalá de Henares, Burgos and Antwerp in 1554, is generally considered the first picaresque novel. The Wikipedia article about the picaresque novel contains a section about its sources, which says, The curious presence of Russian loanwords in the ...

Daredevils of Sassoun (or Sasna Dzrer or Sasna cṙer) is an Armenian heroic epic that "is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Armenian folklore". Its main character is David of Sassoun, whom Wikipedia describes as "the main hero of Armenia's national epic Daredevils of Sassoun, wh...

I'm looking for the title of a short story I read in the late '90s (but which I think was significantly older). The core element of the story was a piece of furniture with some kind of salacious carvings on it. One character (the narrator?) originally acquires it, but decides that the carvings ma...