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Literary Genre table
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| x name | x image | x Books In This Genre | x Stories In This Genre | x article |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| x Science fiction |
|
Foundation and Empire | The Horror from the Magellanic |
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that aren't necessarily accepted by mainstream science. such as extra-terrestrial life forms, alien worlds, and time travel, often...
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| Foundation | The Broken Stars | |||
| The Skylark of Space | The Shores of Infinity | |||
| Second Foundation | The Kingdoms of the Stars | |||
| Foundation's Edge | Memorare | |||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Thriller |
|
Agent S.E.V.E.N. | Lunch at the Gotham Cafe |
Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film, television, and gaming that includes numerous and often overlapping sub-genres.
Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, and resourceful heroes who must thwart the plans of more...
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| Nuked, Not Stirred | The Birds | |||
| Operation Asia | Dolan's Cadillac | |||
| The Godfather | ||||
| The Thirty-nine Steps | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Crime fiction |
|
Three Problems for Solar Pons | The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl |
Crime fiction is the genre of fiction that deals with crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be,...
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| The Fever Tree | Amriter Mrityu | |||
| Number Seven, Queer Street | ||||
| Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk | ||||
| The Solar Pons Omnibus | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Chivalric romance |
|
The Lord of the Rings |
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was particularly current in aristocratic literature of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, that narrated fantastic stories...
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| The House of the Seven Gables | ||||
| Joseph Andrews | ||||
| The Black Tulip | ||||
| x Creative nonfiction |
|
God is Not Great |
Creative nonfiction (also known as literary or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing truth which uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as...
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| Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team | ||||
| Click Click Snap | ||||
| x Cyberpunk |
|
The Diamond Age | New Rose Hotel |
Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life". The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk", published in 1983. It...
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| Snow Crash | Johnny Mnemonic | |||
| Neuromancer | The Gernsback Continuum | |||
| Signal to Noise | Red Star, Winter Orbit | |||
| After the Long Goodbye | True Names | |||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Steampunk |
|
Warlord of the Air |
Steampunk is a sub-genre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often Victorian...
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| The Difference Engine | ||||
| The Anubis Gates | ||||
| Mortal Engines | ||||
| Predator's Gold | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Splatterpunk | The Bighead |
Splatterpunk is a term that David J. Schow coined in the mid-1980s at the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, refers to a movement within horror fiction distinguished by its graphic, often gory, depiction of violence and "hyperintensive horror...
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| x Horror |
|
The Green Mile | The Shadow Over Innsmouth |
Horror fiction is fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the audience. Historically, the cause of the "horror" experience has often been the intrusion of a supernatural element into everyday human experience. Since the 1960s,...
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| Dark Carnival | The Oval Portrait | |||
| Strange Gateways | Night Surf | |||
| The Travelling Grave and Other Stories | The Mangler | |||
| Skull-Face and Others | I Am the Doorway | |||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Western |
|
10000$ Reward |
The Western is a fiction genre seen in film, television, radio, literature, painting and other visual arts. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the later half of the 19th century in what became the Western United States (known...
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| Comanche Moon | ||||
| True Grit | ||||
| Tonto Basin | ||||
| Breakheart Pass | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x True crime | ESCAPE |
True crime is a non-fiction literary genre in which the author uses an actual crime and real people as a point of departure. The crimes almost always include murder. They can be fairly factual or highly speculative and heavily fictionalized...
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| From Hell | ||||
| Wisconsin Murders | ||||
| A Cold Case | ||||
| Sara Payne: A Mother's Story | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Hardboiled |
|
The Big Sleep | Mandarin's Jade |
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style distinguished by an unsentimental portrayal of crime, violence, and sex.
Pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined by...
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| Devil in a Blue Dress | Red Wind | |||
| Gun, with Occasional Music | Killer in the Rain | |||
| Farewell, My Lovely | Finger Man | |||
| The Little Sister | The King in Yellow | |||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Campus novel | Nice Work |
A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s. The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is...
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| Changing Places | ||||
| Small World: An Academic Romance | ||||
| Tomcat in Love | ||||
| x Alternate history |
|
1940 - England Invaded | The Last Article |
Alternate history or alternative history is a subgenre of speculative fiction (or science fiction) and historical fiction that is set in a world in which history has diverged from the actual history of the world. It is sometimes abbreviated AH. ...
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| The Man in the High Castle | ||||
| SS-GB | ||||
| The Domination | ||||
| The Difference Engine | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Erotica |
|
Sexperiencias |
Erotica (from the Greek Eros—"desire") or "curiosa," works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or sexually arousing descriptions. Erotica is a modern word used...
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| Belinda | ||||
| Equinox | ||||
| The Misfortunes of Virtue | ||||
| Kama Sutra | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Romance novel |
|
Sprig Muslin | Only human |
The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally...
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| The Conqueror | ||||
| Powder and Patch | ||||
| Devil's Cub | ||||
| Beauvallet | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Regency romance |
|
The Nonesuch |
Regency romances are a subgenre of romance novels set during the period of the English Regency or early 19th century. Rather than simply being versions of contemporary romance stories transported to a historical setting, Regency romances are a...
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| Charity Girl | ||||
| The Unknown Ajax | ||||
| The Corinthian | ||||
| Regency Buck | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Cosy catastrophe |
Cosy catastrophe is the name given to a style of post-apocalyptic science fiction that was particularly prevalent after the Second World War and among British science fiction writers.
The term was coined by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The...
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| x Post-holocaust |
Post-holocaust is a sub-genre of science fiction dealing with the aftermath of a catastrophe---usually nuclear war, but not invariably. It rose to prominence following World War II, because for the first time it was believed that man had the...
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| x Fantasy |
|
Lady Friday | Calliope |
Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, the majority of fantasy works have been literature. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic...
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| Sabriel | A Dream of a Thousand Cats | |||
| Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Façade | |||
| The Green Mile | The Mangler | |||
| The Lord of the Rings | The Sect of the Phoenix | |||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Sword and sorcery |
|
Conan of Cimmeria: Volume One | By This Axe, I Rule |
Sword and sorcery (S&S;) is a fantasy subgenre generally characterized by swashbuckling heroes engaged in exciting and violent conflicts. An element of romance is often present, as is an element of magic and the supernatural. Unlike works of high...
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| Conan of Cimmeria: Volume Two | The Shadow Kingdom | |||
| Conan of Cimmeria: Volume Three | Worms of the Earth | |||
| Conan and the Spider God | ||||
| Conan the Liberator | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Heroic fantasy | The Name of the Wind |
Heroic fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy which chronicles the tales of heroes and their conquests in imaginary lands. Stories tend to be intricate in plot, often involving many peoples, nations and lands. Grand battles and the fate of the world are...
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| x Bildungsroman | Inkheart |
A bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.roˌmaːn]; German: "novel of formation" or "novel of education") is a novelistic genre that arose during the German Enlightenment, in which the author presents the psychological, moral and social...
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| The Longest Journey | ||||
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | ||||
| Mansfield Park | ||||
| Invisible Man | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Captivity narrative |
|
Captivity narratives are stories of people captured by "uncivilized" enemies. The narratives often include a theme of redemption by faith in the face of the threats and temptations of an alien way of life. Barbary captivity narratives, stories of...
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| x Picaresque novel |
|
Don Quixote |
The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca", from "pícaro", for "rogue" or "rascal") is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social...
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| Joseph Andrews | ||||
| Humphry Clinker | ||||
| The Adventures of Augie March | ||||
| Moon Palace | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Magic realism |
|
The Bloody Chamber | Distant Replay |
Magic realism, or magical realism, is an artistic genre in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even "normal" setting. It has been widely used in relation to literature, art, and film.
As used today the...
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| Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord | ||||
| The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman | ||||
| The House of the Spirits | ||||
| Wise Children | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x War novel | Days of Ziklag |
A war novel is a novel in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat, or in a domestic setting (or home front) where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war.
The war novel's main roots lie...
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| Shiloh | ||||
| Under Fire | ||||
| The Forty Days of Musa Dagh | ||||
| Good King Harry | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Science fantasy | The Mount |
Science fantasy is a mixed genre of stories which contain some science fiction and some fantasy elements.
A definition, offered by Rod Serling, is that "science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible...
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| Breakfast in the Ruins | ||||
| The Promise of Eden | ||||
| Majestrum | ||||
| x Robinsonade | The Female American |
Robinsonade is a literary genre that takes its name from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The success of this novel spawned enough imitations that its name was used to define a genre, which is sometimes described simply as a "desert...
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| x Procedural |
A Procedural is a cross-genre type of literature, film, or television program involving a sequence of technical detail. A documentary film may be written in a procedural style to heighten narrative interest.
In television, "procedural" specifically...
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| x Novel |
|
All the King's Men | ...And Call Me Conrad |
A novel (from the Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern...
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| Big Sur | At the Mountains of Madness | |||
| Maggie Cassidy | ||||
| Visions of Gerard | ||||
| The Hand of Ethelberta | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Literary fiction | The Echo Maker |
Literary fiction is a term that has come into common usage since around 1970, principally to distinguish serious fiction (that is, work with claims to literary merit) from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction (i.e., paraliterature)....
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| Divisadero | ||||
| The Magic Toyshop | ||||
| Only Revolutions | ||||
| The Law of Dreams | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Non-fiction | Essential cataloguing |
Non-fiction is an account or representation of a subject which is presented as fact. This presentation may be accurate or not; that is, it can give either a true or a false account of the subject in question. However, it is generally assumed that...
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| In Praise of Slow | ||||
| Applied Cryptography | ||||
| Networks of Innovation | ||||
| What just happened: a chronicle from the information frontier | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Space opera |
|
Return to the Stars | The Horror from the Magellanic |
Space opera is a subgenre of speculative fiction or science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing powerful (and sometimes quite...
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| Battlefield Earth | The Broken Stars | |||
| Hyperion | The Shores of Infinity | |||
| Sporting Chance | The Kingdoms of the Stars | |||
| Once a Hero | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Comic book |
|
Tintin in the Congo | Calliope |
A comic book (often shortened to simply comic and sometimes called a funny book, comic paper or comic magazine) is a magazine made up of narrative artwork, virtually always accompanied by dialog (usually in word balloons, emblematic of the comic...
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| Cigars of the Pharaoh | A Dream of a Thousand Cats | |||
| The Blue Lotus | Façade | |||
| Tintin in the Land of the Soviets | ||||
| Tintin in America | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Political philosophy |
|
Anarchy, State, and Utopia |
Political philosophy is the study of questions about the city, government, politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what makes a government...
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| Mein Kampf | ||||
| Lament for a nation | ||||
| The Ethics of Liberty | ||||
| For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Role-playing game |
|
Arcana Unearthed |
A role-playing game (RPG; often roleplaying game) is a game in which the participants assume the roles of fictional characters. Participants often determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization, and the actions succeed or...
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| Iron Heroes | ||||
| Player's Handbook | ||||
| Dungeon Master's Guide | ||||
| Miniatures Handbook | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Dystopia |
|
Nineteen Eighty-Four | Harrison Bergeron |
A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia, kakotopia, cackotopia, or anti-utopia) is the vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease,...
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| Battle Royale | Welcome to the Monkey House | |||
| Atlas Shrugged | "If This Goes On—" | |||
| The Trial | ||||
| Fahrenheit 451 | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Fiction |
|
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone | The Library of Babel |
Fiction, from the Latin fingere to create, fictum created, is anything imaginatively invented, a feigned existence, event, or state of things. In a second more concrete and basically 20th-century meaning fiction has become the general term uniting...
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| Ficciones | Calliope | |||
| Ulysses | A Dream of a Thousand Cats | |||
| In Search of Lost Time | Façade | |||
| Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Speculative fiction |
|
1632 | Embracing-the-New |
Speculative fiction is a fiction genre speculating about worlds that are unlike the real world in various important ways. In these contexts, it generally overlaps one or more of the following: science fiction, fantasy fiction, horror fiction,...
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| Black Man | Inside Job | |||
| Altered Carbon | ||||
| Dreamside | ||||
| Warchild | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Biography | The Life of Erasmus Darwin |
A biography is a description or account of someone's life, which is usually published in the form of a book or essay, or in some other form, such as a film. An autobiography (auto meaning "self," giving "self-biography") is a biography by the same...
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| The Life of Raymond Chandler | ||||
| J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography | ||||
| Mandela: The Authorised Biography | ||||
| Curly: An Illustrated Biography of the Superstooge | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Atlas |
|
Dell'Arcano del Mare |
An atlas is a collection of maps, typically of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets (and their satellites) in the solar system. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in...
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| Atlas Maior | ||||
| The Times Atlas of World History | ||||
| Historical Atlas of the World | ||||
| Oxford Atlas of the World | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Dialogue |
|
The Sceptical Chymist |
A dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog) is a conversation between two or more people. It is also a literary form in which two or more parties engage in a discussion.
When reported or imitated in writing, "dialogue" labels a form of literature used by...
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| Gli Asolani | ||||
| x History |
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History of Britain | A Boy in France |
History is the study (teaching) of the past, with special attention to the written record of the activities of human beings over time. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to...
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| America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War | A Bathroom of Her Own | |||
| Classical music in America : a history of its rise and fall | ||||
| Making music modern : New York in the 1920s | ||||
| Libro de los juegos | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Epistolary novel |
|
Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister |
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs and...
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| Love Letters From a Noble Man to his Sister, pt. 2 | ||||
| The Amours of Philander and Silvia, pt. 3 | ||||
| Ella Minnow Pea | ||||
| Clarissa | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Autobiography |
|
Mark Twain's Autobiography |
An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein to write) is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.
The word autobiography was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English...
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| Dreams from My Father | ||||
| Eric & Ernie | ||||
| Ecce Homo | ||||
| Memories of a Catholic Girlhood | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Utopian and dystopian fiction | The Trial |
The utopia and its offshoot, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation...
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| Fahrenheit 451 | ||||
| Random Acts of Senseless Violence | ||||
| Terraplane | ||||
| Elvissey | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Tract |
|
Areopagitica |
A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the twenty-first century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political...
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| Of Education | ||||
| x Polemic | Areopagitica |
Polemics (pronounced /pəˈlɛmɪks/, /poʊ-/) is the practice of disputing or controverting religious, philosophical, political, or scientific matters. As such, a polemic text on a topic is often written specifically to dispute or refute a position or...
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| The End of Faith | ||||
| x Lecture notes | Tyrocinium Chymicum | |||
| x Dictionary |
|
Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana |
A dictionary is a book or collection of words in a specific language, often listed alphabetically, with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known...
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| Nippo Jisho | ||||
| Aqui comienca un vocabulario en la lengua castellana y mexicana | ||||
| Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana | ||||
| A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Lectio Divina | Introduction to the Devout Life |
Lectio Divina is Latin for divine reading, spiritual reading, or "holy reading," and represents a traditional Christian practice of prayer and scriptural reading intended to engender communion with the Triune God and to increase in the knowledge of...
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| x Comic novel | Porterhouse Blue |
A comic novel is a work of fiction in which the writer seeks to amuse the reader, sometimes with subtlety and as part of a carefully woven narrative; sometimes, above all other considerations.
One of the most notable British comic novelists is P. G....
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| Chart Throb | ||||
| The Third Policeman | ||||
| The Worms of Kukumlima | ||||
| Moo | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Science |
|
The God Delusion |
Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") refers to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome. In this sense, science may refer to a highly skilled...
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| The Society of Mind | ||||
| The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century | ||||
| Made In America | ||||
| The Laws of Physics | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Popular science | The Music of the Primes |
Popular science, sometimes called literature of science, is interpretation of science intended for a general audience. While science journalism focuses on recent scientific developments, popular science is broad-ranging, often written by scientists...
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| The Naked Woman | ||||
| Chaos: Making a New Science | ||||
| The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe | ||||
| George's Secret Key to the Universe | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Light poetry | The Oxford Sausage |
Light poetry, or light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature wordplay, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration....
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| Oh, What Silly Nonsense! | ||||
| x Humour |
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Blandings Castle | The Angel of the Odd |
Humour or humor (see American and British English spelling differences) is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Many theories exist about what humour is and what social function it serves....
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| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Waste of space | |||
| The Restaurant at the End of the Universe | ||||
| Life, the Universe and Everything | ||||
| So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Cartoon |
|
!G - Rated G |
The word cartoon has various meanings, based on several very different forms of visual art and illustration. The term has evolved over time.
The original meaning was in fine art, and there cartoon meant a preparatory drawing for a piece of art such...
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| x War |
|
Young Bloods |
War is a reciprocated, armed conflict, between two or more non-congruous entities, aimed at achieving a subjectively designed, geo-politically desired result. In his book, On War, Prussian military theoretician Carl Von Clausewitz calls war the ...
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| They Marched into Sunlight | ||||
| Random Harvest | ||||
| Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War | ||||
| In the Company of Heroes | ||||
| more ▼ | ||||
| x Oriental Fantasy | Daisho: Samurai Adventure | |||
