Stranger Than Fiction: A Book of Literary Lists

by Aubrey Malone

Did you know that Arnold Bennett died of typhoid after drinking a glass of Paris tap water to show that it was safe? That Voltaire would get rid of boring house guests by pretending to faint? Or that Raymond Chandler was inspired to write by watching his wife do the housework in the nude? It's all here and more in over 300 fantastic and fascinating literary lists, including authors who wrote standing up, writers who couldn't spell, classic literary ripostes and insults, romances, bizarre dedications, eccentric behavior, discarded titles for famous works, last words, writers' day jobs and hobbies, unusual work habits, sexual peccadilloes, strange deaths, unintended double entendres from the classics, bad reviews of future classics, literary feuds, lost manuscripts, writers and their pets, writers who were spies, writers who stammered...

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference

314 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Born in the west of Ireland, Aubrey Malone was educated at University College, Dublin, graduating with a BA in English and philosophy. He did an M.A. in English, majoring in the literary style of Ernest Hemingway. He went on to write a biography of Hemingway for Robson Books in 1999. For ten years he was a teacher, before becoming a freelance journalist with various newspapers and magazines. He has written over fifty books, including the best-selling The Cynic's Dictionary (Prion). He mainly works in the non-fiction area but he has published two novels and a few collections of poetry and short stories. He has been writing professionally about the cinema since 1973.
His first book, Hollyweird (Michael O’Mara, 1994), focused on the eccentricities of film stars. He followed that up with two books on movies made in Ireland, Michael Collins and Ryan’s Daughter (GLI, both 1996). In 1997 he wrote The Rise and Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley (Leopold Publishing). Three years later he wrote I Was a Fugitive from a Hollywood Film Factory, subsequently reissued as Hollywood Trivia (Prion, 2004).
In 2011 he wrote Censoring Hollywood (McFarland), a book about the history of film censorship. The Defiant One, a biography of Tony Curtis (also McFarland) followed in 2013. In the same year he wrote Maureen O’Hara: A Biography for the University of Kentucky Press. McFarland also published Hollywood’s Second Sex, Malone’s history of the mistreatment of women in movies from 1900 to 1999, in 2016. ABC-CLIO published his study of spirituality in films, Sacred Profanity.
Writing Under the Influence, a study of the relationship between alcohol and literature for thirteen American authors, was published by McFarland in 2017. In 2018 he published a book about people who unfairly failed to win Oscars, And the Loser Is (Vernon Press). That year he also published The Elvis Diaries (One Media), a work of creative fiction based on fact. He is currently working on a biography of Sidney Lumet and an encyclopedia of LGBTQ films.

Reviews

[Jessica]

A collection of authorial lists, trivia, and quotes. It's entertaining, but doesn't have a lot of re-readability.

[TrumanCoyote]

Not necessarily sure that I believed every word of it...but all very entertaining (and nicely droll) nonetheless.

[Helvy]

Waaaaaah buku yang seruuuu banget! A-Z tentang para pengarang ternama yang kita nggak tahu sebelumnya. Benar-benar stranger than fiction! ;D

[Lori]

Cute little lists of different literary facts.

[Fangirl]

This is a fun book and I like picking it up now and again and looking at the some of the lists. Very entertaining!

[Eva]

Informative, but brimming with mistakes ... "Emma" by Charlotte Bronte? Auschwitz = World War I?

[Ann-Marie]

Fun, nice, easy,