Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, and songwriter. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 18 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2023.
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is a novel published on 27 December 1871 by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, University of Oxford, and the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just like a reflection, everything is reversed, including logic.
John Ray Grisham Jr. is an American novelist, lawyer and former member of the 7th district of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his best selling legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.
The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors.
Daniel Michael DeVito Jr. is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He gained prominence for his portrayal of the taxi dispatcher Louie De Palma in the television series Taxi (1978–1983), which won him a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award. He plays Frank Reynolds on the FX and FXX sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2006–present).
Doctor John Dolittle is the central character of a series of children's books by Hugh Lofting starting with the 1920 The Story of Doctor Dolittle. He is a physician who shuns human patients in favour of animals, with whom he can speak in their own languages. He later becomes a naturalist, using his abilities to speak with animals to better understand nature and the history of the world.
Isaac Sidney Caesar was an American comic actor, comedian and writer. With a career spanning 60 years, he was best known for two pioneering 1950s live television series: Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), which was a 90-minute weekly show watched by 60 million people, and its successor, Caesar's Hour (1954–1957), both of which influenced later generations of comedians. Your Show of Shows and its cast received seven Emmy nominations between the years 1953 and 1954 and tallied two wins. He also acted in films; he played Coach Calhoun in Grease (1978) and its sequel Grease 2 (1982) and appeared in the films It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Silent Movie (1976), History of the World, Part I (1981), Cannonball Run II (1984), and Vegas Vacation (1997).
Have Gun – Will Travel is an American Western series that was produced and originally broadcast by CBS on both television and radio from 1957 through 1963. The television version of the series starring Richard Boone was rated number three or number four in the Nielsen ratings every year of its first four seasons.
The Secret Garden is a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett first published in book form in 1911, after serialisation in The American Magazine. Set in England, it is one of Burnett's most popular novels and is seen as a classic of English children's literature. Some of Burnett's other popular novels include Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Lost Prince and A Little Princess. Several stage and film adaptations have been made of The Secret Garden. The American edition was published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company with illustrations by Maria Louise Kirk and the British edition by Heinemann with illustrations by Charles Heath Robinson.
Rhea Jo Perlman is an American actress. She is well-known for playing head waitress Carla Tortelli in the sitcom Cheers (1982–1993). Over the course of 11 seasons, Perlman was nominated for ten Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actress — winning four times — and was nominated for a record six Golden Globe Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a Television Series. She has also appeared in films, including Canadian Bacon (1995), Matilda (1996), The Sessions (2012), Poms (2019), and Barbie (2023).
Ronald Perlman is an American actor, voice actor and producer. His credits include the roles of Amoukar in Quest for Fire (1981), Salvatore in The Name of the Rose (1986), Vincent in the television series Beauty and the Beast (1987–1990), for which he won a Golden Globe Award, One in The City of Lost Children (1995), Johner in Alien Resurrection (1997), Hellboy in both Hellboy (2004) and its sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), Clay Morrow in the television series Sons of Anarchy (2008–2013), Nino in Drive (2011) and Benedict Drask in Don't Look Up (2021).
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a 2003 mystery novel by British writer Mark Haddon. Its title refers to an observation by the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in the 1892 short story "The Adventure of Silver Blaze". Haddon and The Curious Incident won the Whitbread Book Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Unusually, it was published simultaneously in separate editions for adults and children.
Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist. He is best known for the George Miles Cycle, a series of five semi-autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000 and described by Tony O'Neill "as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted." Cooper is the founder and editor of Little Caesar Magazine, a punk zine, that ran between 1976 and 1982.
Lane Smith is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He is the Kate Greenaway medalist (2017) known for his eclectic visuals and subject matter, both humorous and earnest, such as the contemplative Grandpa Green, which received a Caldecott Honor in 2012, and the outlandish Stinky Cheese Man, which received a Caldecott Honor in 1992.
Jess Walter is an American author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, and a non-fiction book. He is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006.
Chess became a source of inspiration in the arts in literature soon after the spread of the game to the Arab World and Europe in the Middle Ages. The earliest works of art centered on the game are miniatures in medieval manuscripts, as well as poems, which were often created with the purpose of describing the rules. After chess gained popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, many works of art related to the game were created. One of the best-known, Marco Girolamo Vida's poem Scacchia ludus, written in 1527, made such an impression on the readers that it singlehandedly inspired other authors to create poems about chess.
Workman Publishing Company, Inc., is an American publisher of trade books founded by Peter Workman. The company consists of imprints Workman, Workman Children's, Workman Calendars, Artisan, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and Algonquin Young Readers, Storey Publishing, and Timber Press.
Lum's was an American family restaurant chain based in Florida with additional locations in several states. It was founded in 1956 in Miami Beach, Florida, by Stuart and Clifford S. Perlman when they purchased Lum's hot dog stand for $10,000. Over the next few years, the Perlman brothers opened three additional Lum's restaurants, for a total of four by 1961.
Alden Caleb Ehrenreich is an American actor. He began his career by appearing in Supernatural (2005), and Francis Ford Coppola's films Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011). Following supporting roles in the 2013 films Blue Jasmine and Stoker, he starred in the Coen brothers comedy Hail, Caesar! (2016), for which he gained praise.
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian writer. He is best known for writing the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize in their respective years of publication. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.
