Literary Prizes, First Lines & Bookish Facts Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1830 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton opens with the words It was a dark and stormy night, followed by a rain-lashed, comma-spliced sentence that has become the standard shorthand for overwrought bad writing?

Question 2

Which 1967 novel opens: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice?

Question 3

Which 1815 novel opens by introducing its heroine as handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seeming to unite some of the best blessings of existence?

Question 4

Which annual award, endowed by the Swedish inventor of dynamite and first given in 1901, is presented by an academy in Stockholm to an author for a whole body of work judged to point in what the founder's will called an ideal direction?

Question 5

What is the name for the string of digits, now thirteen long and usually printed above the barcode, that uniquely identifies one edition and format of a book, so that a shop or library computer knows exactly which object is meant?

Question 6

Which novelist is the most cited example of the early Nobel committee's misjudgements, passed over every year from the prize's founding until his death in 1910 in favour of names now largely forgotten?

Question 7

Which award, given by Spain's culture ministry since 1976 and named for the author of Don Quixote, is regarded as the highest honour in Spanish-language literature, a lifetime award presented by the king on the anniversary of the novelist's death?

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About Literary Prizes, First Lines & Bookish Facts

This quiz is the last in the Literature and Books set, and it is about the book world itself: the prizes that crown novels, the opening lines readers know by heart, and the lore of publishing, libraries, censorship, hoaxes and records. Eighty questions, each describing a prize, quoting a first sentence, or setting out a fact, and asking you to name it from four choices, then explaining it. Only world-level material is used.

The first pack covers the five great prizes, the Nobel, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Women's Prize and the Prix Goncourt, and the most famous openings in fiction, from Call me Ishmael and It is a truth universally acknowledged to the clocks striking thirteen and the colonel facing the firing squad.

The second pack widens to more awards and prize stories, the National Book Award, the International Booker, the Cervantes and Jnanpith and Miles Franklin prizes, Alfred Nobel's change of heart, Sartre's refusal, Pasternak's forced decline, Churchill's win, the Tolstoy snub, the posthumous Pulitzer for A Confederacy of Dunces, and Max Brod's disobedience, then into book history and craft, the Gutenberg Bible, the incunable, the Penguin paperback, samizdat, the blurb, the roman a clef, the epistolary novel, in medias res, the pen name, the three-decker, the Bodleian and Library of Congress, Dewey and the ISBN, more first lines, and the great censorship episodes.

The third pack is records, hoaxes and one-book authors: the most translated books, Ossian and the Hitler Diaries and Ern Malley, Romain Gary's double Goncourt, Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, Emily Bronte, Anna Sewell and the reclusive Salinger, the anonymous campaign novel, the longest novel, the book written without the letter e, the epigraph and dedication and colophon, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the November novel challenge, the Booker of Bookers, and the rediscovery of Stoner.

The wrong answers are always other prizes, books or terms of the same kind. Many questions carry a picture: where the answer is one of several works by a single writer, that writer's portrait appears, since it fits every option equally; elsewhere a neutral object, old books, a library, a quill, a typewriter, sits behind the question without pointing anywhere. Where a first line belongs to a book named elsewhere in the set, the question here asks only which book the words open, a different test, and the prizes and facts are almost all fresh ground. Between them the eight quizzes in this set now run from the classic novel and the writing life through Shakespeare, poetry, children's and young-adult books, science fiction and fantasy and crime fiction to the machinery of the book trade itself. Quotations, dates and attributions have been checked against standard reference works.