Within a Sky Full of Earth

Did you know that "Gulliver's Travels" author Jonathan Swift refused to talk to anyone for an entire year? That Voltaire got rid of boring guests by pretending to faint? That Balzac's hobby was hypnotism?
A collection of over 300 lists - everything you could possibly ask about famous books and writers - is here: authors who wrote standing up, famous last words, writers who couldn't spell, unusual work habits, sexual peccadilloes, unintended double entendres in the classics, bad reviews of future classics, and even writers who were spies.
Find out about the weird and wonderful behaviour of all these wordsmiths such as the poet who, while at Trinity College, Cambridge, kept a bear in his rooms because there was a rule against keeping dogs or cats, or the poet who tied a cat to a kite during a thunderstorm in the hope of seeing it electrocuted.

Aubrey Malone was born in Co Mayo, but moved to Dublin in 1969. He has worked mainly in journalism and is the author of numerous publications including The Brothers Behan (Blackhall), the best-selling The Cynic's Dictionary (Prion); Historic Pubs of Dublin (New Island); and a biography of Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway: The Grace and the Pressure (Robson Books). His most recent book is a biography of the American poet Charles Bukowski, The Hunchback of East Hollywood (Headpress).

Literary Trivia by Aubrey Malone • PRION BOOKS • 2004
[A new edition is coming in January 2008, but we still have this one left. It's an enjoying book about literary facts that will fill your curiosity about authors and their creative process to write and to live for it.]