Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 39

... that Sholom Aleichem (שלום־עליכם, Шолом-Алейхем; pictured) was a popular humorist and Russian Jewish author of Yiddish literature, and that the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof is based on his short stories?

... that "Suspension of disbelief" is a term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817), and that it refers primarily to the willingness of a reader or viewer to accept the premises of a work of fiction, even if they are fantastic or impossible?

... that Terry Southern is the author of the 1959 episodic novel, The Magic Christian?

... that Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Huxley's Island, Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, Bradbury's The History Man, and Naipaul's A Bend in the River are five of the novels selected by Anthony Burgess for his 1984 book, Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939: A Personal Choice?

... that Madame Bovary commits suicide by swallowing arsenic?

... that the musical White Horse Inn was originally conceived as a play without music?

... that "cult fiction" is an umbrella term for books that tend to attract a cult following &mdash; including banned books, transgressive fiction, controversial books, erotic literature, and genre fiction?