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Creepy children's illustrated book, like Jumanji, about boy waiting for parents to come home with new baby, sees faces in walls
I have a very distinct yet vague memory of a book I remember reading at school. It had very little text, and was illustrated, in a format similar to Jumanji or Where The Wild Things Are. The illustration style was very similar to the former - almost…
TCassa
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What is so satanic about Manchester?
The demon Crowley, living on Earth was as long as it existed, has long been weaving plots to aid Hell in the coming Armageddon. Though, of course, it doesn't seem that good an idea when it starts, both Crowley and Aziraphale worked in their…
Gallifreyan
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Is there any evidence of who assaulted Lola in "Atonement", given the final reveal?
Content Note: Discussion of the sexual assault of a minor, and "evidence" of the innocence or guilt of possible suspects.
Atonement revolves around Briony, who as a child is the only witness to Lola being raped. Briony doesn't get a look at the…
Standback
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Why is the month of Aprill masculine?
In the first line of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, the month of April is given a masculine pronoun:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
Why is this?
user111
14
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Are the inconsistencies in Harry Potter symbolic or allegorical?
(I asked a more verbose version of this question on Sci Fi & Fantasy where it didn't go down well. It seemed to get bogged down in whether or not the Potterverse really is "inconsistent". But I feel it's an interesting topic which might go down…
Matt Thrower
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A story in which a young girl saves a poor boy from a factory owner and meets that boy decades later
Yesterday, I was reading a 5th grader's comprehension book. It had multiple excerpts from good (if not well-known) novels.
One of them particularly stood out to me. It was about a woman who lived in the Victorian era. When she was a young girl,…
Soha Farhin Pine
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What sources influenced Byron's "Fragment of a Novel"?
Lord Byron's "Fragment of a Novel" is an unfinished story about a vampire. (It's not clear from the story that the man is a vampire, but at least according to this site, Byron said that the man would have arisen from the dead to feed on the upper…
amaranth
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What inspired the writing of Sredni Vashtar?
Of the many short stories by Saki, I found Sredni Vashtar to be one of the darkest. While many of his stories are morbid, Sredni Vashtar has a young boy praying for the death of his guardian to something he imagines to be a god. Sredni Vashtar and…
muru
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Children's book - eat the dictionary
The premise is pretty simple and straightforward: [caterpillar, moth, worm, bug of some sort] eats its way through a dictionary, one letter at a time. It is only able to speak using words starting with the letters it had eaten. By the time it…
dmg
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Did Philip Larkin use a swearword while quoting from Pym's Excellent Women?
In a letter to Barbara Pym dated 18 July 1971, Philip Larkin allegedly wrote:
I reread Excellent Women before coming away—what a marvellous set of characters it contains! Sometimes it's hard to believe they're all in the same book, Rocky, Helena,…
verbose
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Meaning of "furnished with a pipe and a supply of cold without" in Trollope's "Orley Farm"
In Trollope's Orley Farm we are told that Mr. Moulder was "furnished with a pipe and a supply of cold without." What does this mean? It appears a little later that Moulder also has a glass of brandy and water.
Trollope, Anthony. Orley Farm.…
Richard Hevener
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Understanding a reference to Tom Sawyer in the context of avoiding work
I am Brazilian, I frequent the Mathematica Stack Exchange, and I've never heard of Tom Sawyer.
So it was confusing when I read a meta post that described people as "Tom Sawyers".
"There are a few people who frequent the Mathematica.SE site for the…
LCarvalho
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Why did Stephen King choose room number 217?
In The Shining, room 217 is the room that is focused on as having a dark history and being a haunted room due to the tragedy of Mrs. Massey. Danny is warned not to enter this room and anyone who enters the room has bizarre encounters.
Why did…
steelersquirrel
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What happened on April 22, 1838?
The poem Kateryna by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (also known as Kobzar) is dedicated to Vasilii Andreyevich Zhukovsky "in memory of April 22, 1838." What is this heading referring to?
EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
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What was the earlier expose of racism that Twain wrote that was censored?
This article claims
Ironically, Huck Finn was conceived only after an earlier explicit
exposé by Twain of slavery was censored.
Does anyone have more information about this earlier expose? The name, the actual contents would be nice, why it was…
user254694
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