Literature

Question 1

This person’s actions are described using three authorial voices in a 1990 Kirkpatrick Sale book that calls him a pathological liar. This person laid out the imperatives of choosing a Last World Emperor and finding the Garden of Eden in his Book of Prophecies. Washington Irving’s fictional biography of this person perpetuated a myth that one of his theories defied Catholic doctrine

Answer 1

Colombus

Question 2

This author created a character who searches for Nicholas Vedder and Brom Dutcher when he returns from playing ninepins with Henry Hudson in the Catskill Mountains. In a story from this author’s collection The (*) Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Katrina Van Tassel marries Brom Bones after his romantic rival, Ichabod Crane, is chased away by the Headless Horseman. For 10 points, name this author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Answer 2

Irving, Washington

Question 3

The end of this short story refers to a “common wish of all hen-pecked husbands” and states that the title character tells this story to “every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle’s hotel”. The end of this story also states that whenever there is a thunderstorm in the Catskills, people imagine it is Henry Hudson playing nine-pins. Earlier in this story, the title character is surprised to see a picture of George Washington where there used to be a picture of King George III. For 10 points, name this story written by Washington Irving about a man who sleeps for 20 years.

Answer 3

RIP Van Winkle

Question 4

This author first found success with a “History” that described a character “exactly five feet six inches in height and six feet five inches in circumference.” A series of tales set at Bracebridge Hall by this creator of the politician Wouter van Twiller helped invent the American notion of Christmas. In one story by this author, a teacher passes by a tree haunted by (*) Major Andre on his horse Gunpowder. That same character created by this author encounters a figure that is implied to be his rival, Brom Bones, wearing a jack-o-lantern. This author, who published several stories under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, created the character of Geoffrey Crayon. For 10 points, name this author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Answer 4

Irving, Washington

Question 5

This story titles a Carol Ann Duffy poem whose narrator “found some hobbies for myself,” reimagining a character in this story who induces an “obsequious and conciliating nature” in the protagonist and dies from a broken blood vessel “in a fit of passion at a peddler.

Answer 5

RIP Van Winkle

Question 6

The Englishman John Symmes (“sims”) theorized that the north and south of this location led to a peaceful civilization called Symzonia (“sim-ZONE-ya”). Some theories hold that a so-called “Pac-Man Effect” allows people to teleport between the borders of this location to prevent leaving it. A biography by Washington Irving promulgated a so-called “error” regarding beliefs about this location in the Middle Ages.

Answer 6

Earth

Question 7

This man invented the character of Fray Agapida to present the “monkish zealot” perspective in one of his narrative histories. In a story by this author, a man who always carries two Bibles finds an apron holding a heart and liver tied to a tree.

Answer 7

Irving, Washington

Question 8

A character insists that this concept “did not exist” after leaving money to an old woman in “The Eternal City,” who says that this concept was used to kick out prostitutes from an apartment

Answer 8

catch-22

Question 9

A character in this story rides past a tree haunted by Major Andre on his horse Gunpowder after having his marriage proposal rejected at a harvest party. Katrina van Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy farmer, ends up marrying Brom

Answer 9

Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Question 10

In this short story, Judith Cardenier unknowingly tells her father that his wife “broke a blood-vessel”while arguing with a peddler while the title man was away with the “crew of the Half-moon.” A sound “like distant peals of (*) thunder”

Answer 10

RIP Van Winkle

Question 11

This character is described as “a great favorite among all the good wives of the village,” but had an “aversion to all kinds of profitable labor,” with “ragged” children and the “worst-conditioned” farm. This character visits Johnathan Doolittle’s Union Hotel, where he is asked if he voted “Federal or Democrat” and learns that Nicholas Veder had (*) died

Answer 11

RIP Van Winkle

Question 12

This man invented the character of Fray Agapida to present the “monkish zealot” perspective in one of his narrative histories. In a story by this author, a man who always carries two Bibles finds an apron holding a heart and liver tied to a tree. In that story by this man, an ominous lumberjack, who is harvesting trees with the names of famous families written on them, makes a deal to share the treasure of Captain Kidd…legend of sleepy hollow

Answer 12

Irving, Washington

Question 13

A poem with this title was called “a real ‘trifle’” and “very bad… perhaps like Ernest Hemingway!” in a letter to a mentor who suggested revising a line about “breathing in.” A poem with this title describes a cliffside as a “defiant edifice” with “all the physical features of / ac- / cident” and “All / external / marks of abuse.” The speaker of a poem with this title admires a “five-haired beard of wisdom” and “brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper.” One poem with this title describes its subjects “[wading] / through black jade,” while another ends as oil spreads around a“little rented boat… filled up” with victory “until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” For 10 points, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop both wrote poems with what title about an aquatic creature?

Answer 13

the Fish

Question 14

A flashback in this story references the “potato-faced” Tristan Tzara, as well as “Julian,” a thinlydisguised portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This story’s protagonist beats the owner of the Madlener-haus at gambling before a train of Austrian officers is bombed. This story is titled for an object described as “wide as all the world.” A “dried and frozen carcass of a leopard” foreshadows the protagonist’s fate at the beginning of this story, which ends with a (*) hyena whining

Answer 14

the snows of kilimanjaro

Question 15

In a short story by this author, a man who is twice seen lying on a bed “with all of his clothes on” tells another character “There ain’t anything to do now.” In a one page long short story by this author, a soldier who is rejected by Luz catches gonorrhea in the back of a taxi. In a memoir by this author, a man who is described as having “the face of a frog” watches (*) Ezra Pound and the narrator as they box.

Answer 15

Hemingway, Ernest

Question 16

A people to its northwest refer to this mountain as Mt. Oibor. The Reusch (ROISH) Pit is a crater on this mountain. A dike swarm feeds its subsidiary cones of Kileo, Ol Merouk and Lerongo. The related Pare Mountains are visible to the southeast of this mountain’s summit. The Great Barranco is a deep gorge on this mountain whose Rombo and Kilema Zones define its rockfall risk to the south and east.

Answer 16

Mt. Kilimanjaro

Question 17

After being told to “shut your trap,” Anders points out that the men accosting him are inadvertently referencing this story in a tale by Tobias Wolff. A character in this story reminds his friend “You were in a kosher convent,” explaining why he thinks a couple characters look like “girl-friends in a convent” as they sit next to each other with towels in their mouths. This story ends after its protagonist confuses Mrs. Bell with the rooming-house proprietor

Answer 17

the Killers

Question 18

Jake Barnes travels to Pamplona, Spain in this man’s novel The Sun Also Rises. Another book by this man features a main character who admires the “great Joe DiMaggio” and is helped by a boy named Manolin. In that book, Santiago breaks his streak of 84 days without catching a (*) fish

Answer 18

Hemingway, Ernest

Question 19

While the protagonist of a story is being examined by a doctor, this substance tells him, “Banish them. Refuse to speak.” This substance titles a story whose protagonist, in a flashback, remembers a half-witted boy who’s surprised when he’s arrested for killing a man who asked for horse feed. In another story, Deirdre casts the protagonist a shy glance after he correctly answers Mrs. Buell’s question about the Northwest Passage, which interrupts his thoughts about how this substance is gradually making it harder for him to hear the (*) mailman coming

Answer 19

snow

Question 20

The speaker thinks of “washing underwear in the Atlantic” during one of these events in a poem that describes a body “stretching like a tear / Along the paper.” In a Georgia Douglass Johnson poem whose last line implies one of these events, the speaker asks the addressee to “Wait in the still of eternity / until I come to you.” Kassi Underwood’s May Cause Love and Mira Ptacin’s Poor You Soul are memoirs centering on these events, one of which titles a poem in which the speaker drives south “where Pennsylvania humps on endlessly, wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair.” One of these events is central to several of the poems in

Answer 20

abortions

Question 21

These objects partially title a short story collection about heroin users by Irvine Welsh. In one of these locations, a man discusses an operation with Jig in “Hills like White Elephants.” These objects are built by a company that fights against wheat farmers in Frank Norris’s The Octopus. In a novel set in one of these locations, a Belgian detective deduces that

Answer 21

trains

Question 22

A woman in one story by this author shoots a Tommy ram and later advises a character to drink broth instead of whiskey-soda. In another of this author’s stories, a woman tells her lover to “please please please stop talking” as he insists that an operation is “perfectly simple.” This author wrote a story in which Compton’s arrival to save the protagonist is revealed to be a dream shortly before (*) Harry dies

Answer 22

Hemingway, Ernest

Question 23

After doing this activity near a deserted lumber town, the protagonist of a story complains, “You know everything” during a break-up with his girlfriend Marjorie. In a two-part story about this activity, a man happily exclaims “Geezus Chrise” after burning his tongue on some beans and spaghetti. A man in a novel says that he is glad just to do this activity and not also to “kill the sun or the moon or the stars.” The protagonist traverses the burnt-over landscape of Seney,

Answer 23

fishing

Question 24

A man in this collection relates how a wrought iron grating from a house makes a “simply priceless” barricade on a bridge. Later versions of this collection opened with a piece that begins “The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight” during a refugee evacuation. Edmund Wilson praised the “artistic dignity” of this collection, claiming that its author “almost invented a form of his own.”

Answer 24

In our time

Question 25

The narrator of a book about this activity claims that “all modern American literature comes from…Huckleberry Finn.” In a story about this activity, a man quotes Shakespeare’s line that “a man can die but once” to a woman who later repeatedly insists to him, “stop it,” while he goads her by asking why she didn’t use poison. An excursion for this activity that an author took with Pauline Pfeiffer is recounted in a memoir titled for a certain place’s

Answer 25

hunting

Question 26

One character in this short story comments that boulders in the distance are only dangerous if they fall on you. That man claims that the people he employs prefer lashings over fines, asking “Which would you rather do? Take a good birching or lose your pay?” This short story begins with characters drinking and “pretending that nothing had happened.” It ends with a man sarcastically saying “Please is much better. Now I’ll stop” after asking a woman why she hadn’t poisoned her husband instead because “That’s what they do in England.” One character in this story dreams of the (*) animal he failed to kill while hunting

Answer 26

the short happy life of francis macomber

Question 27

A man of this profession locks up his daughter after he finds her in a forest, but relents in terror when her love Jasper pretends to be a ghost. A “Citizen” inserts a “Knight of the Burning Pestle” into a play titled for this profession in a Francis Beaumont comedy, which likely inspired a tragedy titled for this profession by George Lillo. A man of this profession is called a “fawning publican” in a scene in which he remarks that “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

Answer 27

merchant

Question 28

In a story by this author, a woman spies on her husband’s infidelity while carrying fowl to the archaeologist Givens. In a story by this author, Juan Villegas covers up his wife’s murder of the beekeeper Maria Rosa. This author created a character who ferries money between Romanian and Polish agitators and delivers political prisoners “their favorite narcotics.” In a dream, one of this author’s characters is called a murderer and cannibal by Eugenio after she eats flowers from the (*) title tree

Answer 28

Porter, Katherine

Question 29

This author objected to the term “novella,” calling it “a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything.” In one of this author’s stories, a man silently shakes two children for touching his harmonica. This author wrote about the farmer Royal Earle Thompson, who hires escaped mental patient Olaf Helton and kills bounty hunter Homer T.

Answer 29

Porter

Question 30

In one story by this author, a farm laborer almost strangles a child for trying to steal his harmonica, on which he plays an enigmatic folk song. The protagonist of that story, titled for a Swedish folk song, commits suicide after a tour of neighboring farms with his wife on which he attempts to explain his reasons for killing the bounty hunter Homer Hatch. In another story by this author, Adam volunteers for a post in World War I with a life expectancy of nine minutes.

Answer 30

Porter

Question 31

This author objected to the term “novella,” calling it “a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything.” In one of this author’s stories, a man silently shakes two children for touching his harmonica. This author wrote about the farmer Royal Earle Thompson, who hires escaped mental patient Olaf Helton and kills bounty hunter Homer T. Hatch. That story, (*) “Noon Wine

Answer 31

Porter

Question 32

this author…pale horse, pale rider // noon wine // old mortality

Answer 32

porter

Question 33

Name this series of novels which purports to consist of stories from the Wallace Inn compiled by editor Jedediah Cleishbotham (“KLEESH-bahth-um”). This series’s author dictated most of its entry The Legends of Montrose to its actual editor, John Ballantyne.

Answer 33

tales of my landlord

Question 34

Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of My Landlord include this novel, which is set during the aftermath of the “15 rising” and is titled for the nickname of the outlaw Frank Osbaldistone

Answer 34

rob roy

Question 35

The first of the Tales of My Landlord, titled The Black Dwarf, fictionalizes the life of a quarryman who lives in this region. The novel draws heavily on a collection of Minstrelsy of [this place] compiled by Scott

Answer 35

Anglo Scottish Border // Scottish borderlands

Question 36

A story by this author features a family who enjoys lifting themselves and their horses up to a giant hunting horn. In another story by this author, a girl who lives in the castle of a misogynistic Count is distracted by a painting of centaurs while attempting to cut her breasts off. After discussing the King of Ava’s elephants at dinner, the protagonist of a story by this author fights and rapes his fiancee; that story ends with the transformation of the Prioress of Abbey Six. In one of this author’s stories, a ghost recalls being hung for piracy while visiting his two spinster sisters. This author wrote about a man who tells a story about “The Wine of the Tetrarch” before unwrapping his bandages and revealing that he is not the Cardinal, but Kasparson. For 10 points, name this author who included “The Monkey,” “Supper at Elsinore,” and “Deluge at Norderney” in her Seven Gothic Tales

Answer 36

Dinesen, Isak

Question 37

This author included stories such as “The Invincible Slave-Owner” and “Sorrow Acre” in the collection Winter’s Tales. The title meal of one of this author’s stories is created with Martina and Filippa, and the Cardinal ends up being Karpason in another work by this writer. Those stories are “Babette’s Feast” and “The Deluge at Norderney”. The most famous work by this author of (*) Seven Gothic Tales

Answer 37

Dinesen, ISak

Question 38

One story by this writer is about a wizard’s attempt to dream a man into reality, but when the wizard is not burned by a flame, he realizes that he is another person’s dream. This author of “The Circular Ruins” wrote a story that ends “My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.” That story is about a place this author describes as “illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret” and as having adjacent hexagonal rooms. For 10 points, name this author whose story “The Library of Babel” is in his collections The Garden of Forking Paths

Answer 38

Borges (bor-hays)

Question 39

In a novella from this country, a character complains about hearing “Valencia” and “Tea for Two” on a phonograph as he looks onto a sky with two suns. In that novella, a political fugitive falls in love with a recording of Faustine. That work is by an author from this country who declares that “mirrors and copulation” are “abominable” in one story. An author from this country wrote the introduction to this country’s

Answer 39

Argentina

Question 40

In a short story titled for one of these places, the narrator shoots a man in the back before describing himself feeling“infinite penitence and sickness of the heart.” One character in a story titled for one of these places smiles at select words of the song “This Life is Weary” before the protagonist states “Isn’t life, isn’t life-.” A man delivers Godber’s cream puffs in that short story titled for one of these places. The “horse-faced” agent (*) Richard Madden stalks a spy who narrates a short story titled for one of these places. An incomplete novel by Ts’ui Pen titled for one of these places also names the story he appears in. An event is cancelled after Laura Sheridan learns the news of Mr. Scott’s death in a short story by Katherine Mansfield titled for a party in one of these places. For 10 points, name these places including one “of Forking Paths,

Answer 40

gardens

Question 41

A collection by this author recounts the stories of “infamous” characters like Hakim of Merv and the female pirate Ching Shih. In another story by this author, the title symbolist poet, Pierre Menard, accidentally recreates word-for-word an earlier author’s masterpiece. People search for their “Vindications” in a work by this author whose (

Answer 41

Borges

Question 42

The Garden of Forking Paths”
“The Library of Babel” **
“The Aleph”
“The Book of Sand” **
“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”
“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” **
“The South” **
“Death and the Compass” **
“The House of Asterion” **
“The Secret Miracle”
“Funes, The Memorious”
“The Form of the Sword”
“Deutsches Requiem”
“Borges and I”

Answer 42

Borges

Question 43

recurring images in this story include colorful rhombuses that appear both outside of a paint shop and in the windows of an observatory in a strangely symmetrical villa. In this story, the owner of the Liverpool House tavern sees two harlequin-dressed women escort a man with a fake beard into a car driven by a man in a bear mask. This story’s protagonist learns that Daniel Azevedo broke into the wrong room of the Hotel du Nord while trying to steal sapphires. This story ends after a

Answer 43

Death and the compass

Question 44

One of this author’s characters postulates that “reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but hypotheses may not” while investigating a series of three murders, until he himself is killed by Red Scharlach. Another story begins after the death of Beatriz Viterbo and ends with her cousin attempting to write an epic on General San Martin. In addition to (*) “Death and the Compass,”

Answer 44

Borges

Question 45

One of these objects is hidden on Mexico Street by the narrator after he realizes that the “best place to hide a leaf is in a forest.” A footnote to a story describes a location containing these objects as “pointless” and was said by Letizia Alvarex de Toledo. The narrator of a story receives one of these objects from a Scottish salesman who got it from the “outskirts of Bikaner.” Greedy individuals search for prophetic examples of these objects called (*) “Vindications”

Answer 45

books

Question 46

A Scottish Presbyterian gives the narrator of a short story by this author a book titled “Holy Writ.” This author of “The Book of Sand” wrote about a librarian cult named the Purifiers, who search for the Crimson Hexagon. In another short story by this author, a German (*) spy murders Dr. Albert

Answer 46

Borges

Question 47

A novel titled for this substance ends with the protagonist crying tears that turn into a beard after being raped by a circus boss. That novel titled for this substance alternatively ends as the protagonist gives a rare Egyptian coin called a battene to a fictionalized stand-in for Jorge Luis Borges. A story titled for this substance begins by discussing the geometric relation between points, lines, and planes, which the speaker states “is definitely not the best way to begin my tale.” After fathering seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed decides to..

Answer 47

sand//book of sand

Question 48

This author wrote a story in which a Czech playwright is given a year by God to finish a play before being killed by firing squad. This writer described meeting a younger version of himself in The Other , part of his collection The Book of Sand . This writer’s

Answer 48

Borges