Curiosities of Literature: John Sutherland

One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia. Which author had the heaviest brain? What was the original title of 1984? What do 12% of all winners of the Booker prize have in common? When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? And while we’re at it who wrote the first Western and is there any link between asthma and literary genius? Sutherland’s irreverent literary masterpiece illuminates every topic imaginable from author advances to civil war literature to Victorian sex to odd-things-eaten-by-literary characters (think Patrick Bateman’s girlfriend in American Psycho). This is the ideal anthology of useless information for all book lovers.–Publisher description.