Recommended: Nom De Plume by Carmela Ciuraru (and Giveaway)

If you are a regular reader of The Reading Ape, then you're going to love Carmela Ciuraru's Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms.

Each of the sixteen chapters of Nom de Plume tells the story of how one author came to write under a different name, from how Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain to how Sylvia Plath became Victoria Lucas. Ciuraru constructs each story as part biography, part psychological profile. The tacit argument of Nom de Plume is that you can learn a lot about somebody by who they say they are, and why they say they are not.

Engaging without being breezy, informative without being pedantic, these essays offer insightful, fascinating literary portraits without the solemness and heft of so many literary biographies. By giving us a specific angle on the lives of these complex figures, Ciuraru gets to the essence of their lives efficiently and evocatively, which makes for pleasant and piquant summer literary non-fiction.
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I am pleased to be giving away a copy of Nom de Plume this week, courtesy of HarperCollins. Send an email to readingape AT gmail DOT com by Friday, June 10th, 11:59pm EST. Also this week: my daily Literary Fact of the Day on Twitter will come each day from Nom de Plume. So check that out too.
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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

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Literary Fact of the Day | February 2011

Another month, another batch of literary trivia. As always, you can get your Literary Fact of the Day piping fresh each day by following The Ape on Twitter (@readingape) or just stick out for the monthly round-up. (March will feature tidbits about the authors on our 100 Greatest American Novels list).

Here they are (were):

• After the the publication of THE JUNGLE in 1906, both foreign and domestic purchases of American meat fell by half.
• Jack London's father was an astrologer and his mother a spiritualist who claimed to be able to channel the spirit of an Indian chief.
• Stephen Crane was paid $700 in Spanish gold to be a war reporter in Cuba.
• Kafka's two brothers both died before the age of 2. His three sisters died in concentration camps.
• Anne Sexton was the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
• Proust did not move out of his parents' apartment until they were both dead.
•  Robert Penn Warren is the only person to win a Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry.
• Stendhal suffered so badly from syphilis late in life that he could barely hold a pen & had to dictate The Charterhouse of Parma.
• Emily Dickinson named her dog "Carlo" after St. John Rivers' dog in JANE EYRE.
• There are only 6 female authors on The Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century.
• The first Gulf War so upset Barbara Kingsolver that she moved to the Canary Islands for a year.
• Valentine Edition: The oldest known connection of Saint Valentius to romantic love was made by Geoffrey Chaucer.
• Vandals have repeatedly scratched the "Hughes" off of Sylvia Plath's headstone.
• In his late teens, Aldous Huxley contracted a disease that left him totally blind for almost three years.
• After seeing August Sander's photograph "Young Farmers," Richard Powers was inspired to quit his day job to write his first novel.
• In 1886, Jules Verne was shot in the leg by his nephew. Verne then limped for the rest of his life & his nephew was sent to an asylum.
• In 1939, William S. Burroughs severed the last joint of his left little finger intentionally, in an attempt to impress a man he liked.
• Gertrude Stein enrolled in medical school at Johns Hopkins in 1899 but left after two years without finishing her degree.
• Saul Bellow went to Mexico City in 1940 to meet Trotsky, but Trotsky was assassinated the day before they were to meet.
• Maya Angelou was raped at the age of 8 by her uncle. He spent 1 day in jail but was kicked to death the next day by persons unknown.

Literary Fact of the Day | January 2011

Here are the Literary Facts of the Day (#lfotd) from the past month. If you follow The Ape on Twitter, @readingape, you can get these delivered hot and fresh every day. 


Also, if you have a Tweetable factoid you'd like to share, let me know; I'll be happy to give you credit for it. 
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Sales of Haruki Marakami's 1Q84 reached 1 million copies in the first month after its Japanese release http://goo.gl/8obiB


Virginia Woolf once accidentally baked her wedding ring into a pudding (via @flavorpill ) http://goo.gl/zgzog


Martin Amis read comic books exclusively until his aunt gave him some Jane Austen. 


The Bronte sisters' poor health has been attributed to drinking water contaminated by runoff from a nearby graveyard.


Edith Wharton's connections in the French gov't allowed her to report from the front lines during WWI.


During his used-book selling career, Larry McMurtry has bought all or part of 30 bookshops #lfotd (from http://goo.gl/F9Bz5 )


Jonathan Lethem saw STAR WARS 21 times during its original theatrical release.


Margaret Ann Shriver renamed herself "Lionel" at age 15, because she thought a male name suited her better.


Trollope wrote for three hours a day and required of himself "250 words every quarter of an hour" 


Leather ball beats leatherbound: the total revenue for the NFL was $8 billion in 2009. The total book market in 2009 was $5.1 billion.


Fleming's James Bond books were not big sellers in the US until JFK included FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE on a list of his favorite books.


Raymond Chandler could never bring himself to inter his wife's ashes; they sat in storage for 57 years before being buried in 2010.


In 1912, Sherwood Anderson had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for 4 days before being found wandering through a cornfield.


In 1994, six years before the writing a novel of the same name, Dan Brown released a CD called "Angels & Demons."


Angry that she was encroaching on his work, Fitzgerald convinced Zelda's doctors to keep her from writing about their relationship.


In 1907, H. D. Became engaged to Ezra Pound, but the engagement was called off because her father disapproved of him.


Joseph Heller would only begin working on a story when he had the first and last line in mind.


New Yorkers used to gather on the docks as the ship bringing the latest installment of Dickens was arriving.


William Faulkner wrote AS I LAY DYING in six weeks.


A six foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign sat next to Ayn Rand's casket at her funeral.


In the mid-1980s, Nadine Gordimer hid members of the then illegal African National Congress in her home.


Lorrie Moore gave up the piano while studying at Cornell because it was taking up too much of her writing time.

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

A Daily Dose of Literary Trivia

For some unknown reason, we've started tweeting a daily literary fact, somewhat abstrusely called Literary Fact of the Day.

For the non-tweeting out there, here's a run-down of what we chirped last week: 

• Ezra Pound once claimed that he had never read any Russian literature.
• Elizabeth Bishop refused to have her poetry published in anthologies of women's writing.
• Hemingway's personal library had 7000+ volumes including (deliciously) THREE copies of FItzgerald's THE CRACK-UP. 
• Faulkner wanted the text in The Sound in the Fury to be in four colors---one for each of the narrators.
• In 1572, Cervantes was captured by Algerian pirates and enslaved for 5 years, before eventually being ransomed.
• In 2010 dollars, Mr. Darcy's annual income would be about $600,000 per year.
• Shakespeare's only son died in 1596 at the age of 11. His name.....wait for it.........Hamnet. (yup, with an n).

So if you're up for a quotidian morsel of bookish trifles, follow us @readingape or you can search the hashtag #lfotd. If you aren't aboard the Twitter train, never fear: we'll do a run-down from time to time of what you've missed.