A Week of Literary Celebration: LitBash 12

Meet some of the world’s most fascinating writers and their works. A weekly celebration of literary anniversaries, an opportunity to read and to bring books to your home, because "A house without books is like a room without windows." Good opportunity to start with books from writers who were born or died in the following week...

Born this week:

Mircea Eliade, Romania
"The History of Religions is destined to play an important role in contemporary cultural life."

Kobo Abe, Japan
"Often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities"

Frank Arnau, Germany
Best known for crime fiction.

Boris Vian, France
Published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, known for bizarre parodies of criminal fiction.

Jack Kerouac, USA
"Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars."

Harry Harrison, USA
"Cold-blooded killing is just not my thing. I've killed in self-defence, I'll not deny that, but I still maintain an exaggerated respect for life in all forms."

Hugh Walpole, UK
"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well."

Died this week:

Percy Wyndham Lewis, USA
"Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory."

Sherwood Anderson, USA
"In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful."

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Argentina
"There comes a moment in your life when, no matter what you do, you bore everybody else. There is only one way to get back the lost prestige. Dying."

Leopold Sacher Masoch, Austria
Masochism is coined after him.

Charles Bukowski, USA
"I was given the job of milking the cows, finally, and it got me up earlier than anybody. But it was kind of nice, pulling at those cows' tits."

Bernardo Guimaraes, Brasil
Author of Isaura the Slave.

Mikhail Bulgakov, Russia
"Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal - there's the trick!"

Erle Stanley Gardner, USA
Best known for the Perry Mason series of detective stories.

Manuel Rojas, Chile
His works have as a central theme the representation of the instability, misery and marginality of the members of the working class.

Edmondo de Amicis, Italy
Author of Heart.

Heinrich Mann, Germany
"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.... Children learn to read being in the presence of books."

Robert Ludlum, USA
Author of very popular thrillers.