In his biography Albert Camus, fils d'Alger ("Albert Camus, son of Algiers", Fayard 2010, Pluriel 2013) Alain Vircondelet describes the strong connection between Camus and Algeria, especially its capital Algiers. One of the chapters describes a trip that Camus made (in 1937) to the French Prealps...

For several years, Albert Camus was editor-in-chief of Combat, a clandestine newspaper of the French Resistance. In his biography Albert Camus, fils d'Alger ("Albert Camus, son of Algiers", Fayard 2010, Pluriel 2013) Alain Vircondelet (on page 290) writes about Camus's contribution to issue 58 of...

The German Wikipedia article about Shota Rustaveli, author of the Georgian medieval epic poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin claims, Seine Dichtung spiegelt chinesische, persische und griechische Philosophie wider. Translation: His poetry reflects [elements of?] Chinese, Persian and Greek ph...

Theodor Fontane is now regarded as the most important German-language novelist of the second half of the nineteenth century. His work is now often required reading (German: "Pflichtlektüre") for secondary-school pupils. See for example EFFI BRIEST. LANDESABITUR DEUTSCH. Pflichtlektüre, the articl...

I'm writing a novel in first person. The adult voice reminisces about his childhood. There are sections of this story where I want the adult narrator to be completely out of it. I want the child version of himself to narrate these parts. The way to do this I figure is by having the adult pull a d...

A number of important Hindu texts, including the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are referred to as itihasa. According to the Wikipedia article about this collection of texts, A story is considered to be itihasa only when the author of the story has himself witnessed or is part of the story.[citat...

According to the Wikipedia article about Dan Brown's The Da Vince Code (emphasis mine), Possibly the largest reaction [against the novel] occurred in Kolkata, India, where a group of around 25 protesters "stormed" Crossword bookstore, pulled copies of the book from the racks and threw them to th...

The French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) is best known for works such as Lettres de mon moulin ("Letters from My Windmill"), the Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon and his three-act play L'Arlésienne. According to the Wikipedia article about the author, Daudet also exchanged a...

This quote has been variously attributed to Mark Twain (for example, here and here and here and here, with varying amounts of surrounding discussion). The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. Did Mark Twain really say this? If so, where? If...

The Wikipedia article about The Chronicles of Narnia contains the following statement about Aslan: C. S. Lewis described Aslan as an alternative version of Jesus as the form in which he may have appeared in an alternative reality.[28][citation not found][29] Reference 28 in the above quote is W...