Molly is the wife of Joyce's protagonist, Leopold Bloom. The final chapter of the book, often called "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy", is a long and unpunctuated stream of consciousness passage comprising her thoughts as she lies in bed next to her husband.

Nikolai Gogol's most celebrated play was The Inspector General (1836), a comedy which told the tale of a young civil servant who finds himself stranded in a small town, mistaken for an influential government inspector. A masterpiece of dramatic satire, The Inspector General is universally respected as one of the greatest plays of the Russian theatre.

Raskolnikov is the student in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment who commits a cold-blooded murder and afterwards, tormented by his own conscience, seeks sympathy from a prostitute.

Anne Sexton wrote To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Transformations (1971), and The Death Notebooks (1974), as well as Live or Die (1967) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1974, despite a very successful writing career, she lost her lifelong battle with depression and, at the age of 46, committed suicide.

Ray Bradbury and his publishers thought The Fireman was a boring title, so they called a local fire station and asked what temperature paper burned at. The firemen put Bradbury on hold while they burned a book, then reported back, and the rest is history.

Elwin Ransom, the protagonist of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945)), is an expert in languages and medieval literature, unmarried, wounded in World War I, and apparently based on Lewis' friend and fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien.

In 1962, Joe Orton was sentenced to six months in prison for removing books from several local public libraries and modifying the cover art or the blurbs before returning them to the shelves.

The smallest book in the Welsh National Library is Old King Cole. The miniscule volume is one of only 85 copies printed by Scottish publishers in 1985 and can only be read using a microscope. It measures 1mm x 1mm and the pages can only be turned with a needle.

Corín Tellado was a prolific Spanish writer of romance novels and photonovels that were best-sellers in several Spanish-language countries. She published more than 5,000 titles and sold more than 400-million books which have been translated into several languages.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is set in the future and tells the story of D-503, a spacecraft engineer who lives in the One State.