Time for Nerd Jeopardy! (A Literary Trivia Game Show)

Ryan Chapman hosts Nerd Jeopardy, the online literary game show. Tonight Ryan is joined by Hilary Leichter, author of Temporary. Hilary made a special shoutout to DC’s Loyalty Books, a black-owned bookstore with signed bookplates for Temporary.

Indie bookstore of the week: Books Are Magic, who are triple-matching donations to local BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth groups.

Signup for future Jeopardies!

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ROUND ONE

Category 1: TRIOS

100: Vonnegut’s meal for “Champions,” Burroughs’ “Naked” bite, and Herman Koch’s titular repast.
[Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner]

200: N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken” series, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “Shadow”, and Shirley Hazzard’s “Great” will take you to their “Boogie Wonderland” in “September.”
[Earth, Wind, and Fire]

300: Pearl S. Buck’s “Earth,” Marcy Dermansky’s “Marie,” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “Duckling” will get you this Clint Eastwood flick.
[The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly]

400: Take Forster’s posthumous novel, Batman’s sidekick, and the author of “Night Boat to Tangier,” make them Australian brothers and you’ll get these pop stars.
[The Bee Gees (Maurice, Robin, and Barry)]

500: Ready or not: If you take the “NOS4A2” author, Muriel Spark’s “Miss Brodie,” and Pras, you’ll know “The Score.”
[The Fugees]

Category 2: CROSSWORD CLUES “P”

100: Margaret Atwood rewrote “The Odyssey” from this character’s perspective for the Canongate Myth Series (8)
[Penelope]

200: August Wilson’s birthplace and where he set ten of his plays (10)
[Pittsburgh]

300: “Doctor Zhivago” scribe (9)
[Pasternak]

400: Nickname for Shakespeare’s Robin Goodfellow (4)
[Puck]

500: College with appearances in novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and F. Scott Fitzgerald (9)
[Princeton]

Category 3: BOOKISH DRINKS

100: This Woolf treatise emphasizes a private space for your distilled sugarcane.
[A Rum of One’s Own]

200: In this Judy Blume concoction a young woman struggles with religion and mixes tequila, lime juice, and triple sec.
[Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margarita]

300: Henry James’s governess can escape the ghosts by mixing some vodka and OJ.
[The Turn of the Screwdriver]

400: CLUE CREW WITH HILARY LEICHTER
While Proust enjoyed the finer things, this series signals his love of cheap Michigan beer.
[Remembrance of Things Pabst Blue Ribbon]

500: Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel of a mother and daughter’s trip to Spain might go with this mix of bourbon, dairy, and citrus—good for parties and groups.
[Hot Milk Punch]

Category 4: POSTHUMOUSLY

100: Her posthumous work includes “Ariel,” and the “Collected Poems,” which nabbed the Pulitzer in 1982.
[Sylvia Plath]

200: Michelle McNamara spent years investigating the Golden State Killer, which resulted in this book—and shortly after its publication, a suspect’s arrest.
[I’ll Be Gone in the Dark]

300: Written in 1927 and published in 2018, “Barracoon” is this writer’s nonfiction account of the last living survivor of the “black cargo.”
[Zora Neale Hurston]

400: This polymath was a filmmaker, playwright, poet, and a short story writer, whose collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” was excerpted in A Public Space and Granta.
[Kathleen Collins]

500: His debut proved so successful that he spent four decades on a follow-up. At 1100 pages, “Three Days Before the Shooting…” would be published 16 years after its author’s death.
[Ralph Ellison]

Category 5: FUNNY BOOKS

100: DAILY DOUBLE
This 1985 DeLillo work shares its title with a recent Emma Cline story… which features DeLillo as a character.
[White Noise]

200: This Booker winner opens with Justice Clarence Thomas breaking his typical silence to ask the narrator—named Me—”Are you crazy?”
[The Sellout]

300: The eponymous narrator of this work says, “I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground.”
[Gulliver’s Travels]

400: This Nigerian satirist made history in 1986 when he became the first black African awarded the Nobel in Literature.
[Wole Soyinka]

500: Her novel “Made for Love” features a sex doll named Diane, a billionaire tech bro, and Florida.
[Alissa Nutting]

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ROUND TWO

Category 1: DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM

200: Number 298, once assigned to this religious tradition, is no longer used; Mitt Romney would be pissed.
[Mormonism]

400: You’ll find “Die Leiden des jungen Werthers” in section 833, categorized by this topic.
[German fiction]

600: Section 999 concerns the general history of these areas, which is typically the purview of science fiction.
[Extraterrestrial worlds]

800: The first director of the FBI modeled the agency’s filing system on Dewey, after mastering it during his time with the Library of Congress.
[Hoover]

1000: Numbers 402, 502, 602, 702, and 802 span Language, Science, Technology, Arts, and Literature, but they all share this common (and somewhat vague) section title.
[Miscellany]

Category 2: DRUGS

200: This breakthrough memoir was originally titled “I Hate Myself and I Want To Die.” Good thing Elizabeth Wurtzel changed her mind.
[Prozac Nation]

400: Literary agent Bill Clegg showed his own writerly bona fides with this debut on his addiction to crack cocaine.
[Portrait of an Addict as a Young Men]

600: DAILY DOUBLE
Huxley’s “Brave New World” features this drug, used to pacify and sedate the population. (Also a song by The Strokes.)
[Soma]

800: Ayelet Waldman’s book on microdosing LSD carries a title that most of us haven’t experienced since January.
[A Really Good Day]

1000: Irvine Welsh explored heroin addiction with his debut “Trainspotting,” and club drugs with this collection of novellas.
[Ecstasy]

Category 3: CREATURES

200: Poet and essayist Melissa Broder tried her hand at fiction with this book, about a woman’s affair with a sea creature.
[The Pisces]

400: This Latin novel, credited to Petronius, takes its name from the mythical half-man, half-goat.
[The Satyricon]

600: In Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series the infrequent sightings of this creature are thought due to a “time passage” under a body of water.
[The Loch Ness Monster]

800: In Rachel Ingalls’ recently reissued novel a bored housewife is drawn to a human-sized amphibian named Larry.
[Mrs. Caliban]

1000: You’ll find this mythological creature, often depicted as assembled from other animal parts, in a novel by John Barth, an album by John Zorn, and an episode of “The X-Files.”
[Chimera]

Category 4: NOT ABOUT BASEBALL

200: At first glance Isaac Fitzgerald’s picture book could be mistaken for a manual on playing in the big leagues in Pittsburgh.
[How to Be a Pirate]

400: In “The Old Man and the Sea” Santiago catches this type of fish, which—spoiler alert—doesn’t make it to shore.
[Marlin]

600: Darin Strauss’s “Chang and Eng” is a fictional account of two historical figures from modern-day Thailand who share this relation.
[Twins]

800: This book by Dorothea Lasky and Alex Dimitrov started with their Twitter account, which sends tongue-in-cheek advice to its 600k followers.
[Astro-Poets]

1000: Christina Boyle’s biography of Timothy Dolan references his stature in the Roman Catholic church by calling him an “American” this.
[Cardinal]

Category 5: BESTSELLERS

200: Roddy Doyle calls this bestselling novelist “brilliant…. It’s a bit frightening really, because she’s the same age as my oldest child.”
[Sally Rooney]

400: She’s acted in adaptations from bestsellers by Lauren Weisberger, William Styron, Julie Powell, and Robert James Waller.
[Meryl Streep]

600: This Lawrence novel hit the U.S. list in 1959, over thirty years after its publication. (Distribution problems or something.)
[Lady Chatterley’s Lover]

800: A media empire grows with current Times bestsellers “Magnolia Table”—both volumes—by this Texas celebrity.
[Joanna Gaines]

1000: Irving Stone went method and apprenticed as a sculptor for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” his fictional biography of this artist.
[Michelangelo]

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FINAL JEOPARDY

CATEGORY: POETRY

CLUE: T. S. Eliot took an early draft of “The Wasteland” to this poet, who made massive changes—cutting whole pages—which Eliot said greatly improved the work.
[Ezra Pound]