... that Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's (pictured) Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews are picaresque novels?
... that "Better authentic mammon than a bogus god" is the epigraph of Elizabeth George's latest novel, What Came Before He Shot Her (2006), and that it has been taken from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal?
... that William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, and writer, the first English person to work as a printer and to introduce a printing press into England, and also the first English retailer of books?
... that The Road (2006) is a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy?
... that Philip Freneau's poem, "The Indian Burying Ground" (1787), was one of the first to idealize the indigenous peoples of the Americas?
... that Thomas Mann once said that if one had to reduce one's library to six novels, Fontane's Effi Briest would have to be one of them?
... that the Douay-Rheims Bible, a Catholic translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English, was an impressive effort by English Catholics to support the Counter Reformation?