Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964) is a one-sentence novel by Hrabal. The rest are titles by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. The Joke was published in 1969. Immortality was published in 1990. Life is Elsewhere was published in 1969. The Festival of Insignificance was published in 2015.

Born in Brno, Bohumil Hrabal is Czech and is one of the Czech Republic’s best known writers.

I Served the King of England was published in 1971.

Bohumil Hrabal published I Served the King of England in 1971.

This is the novelist and social critic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973.

Bruno Schulz wrote The Street of Crocodiles in 1934. Bohumil Hrabal wrote Closely Watched Trains (1965). Günter Grass wrote Cat and Mouse (1961). Ludmilla Petrushevskaya wrote There once lived a girl who seduced her sister's husband, and he hanged himself : love stories (2013).

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) is also by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The other titles are all by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. Too Loud a Solitude was published in 1976. Harlequin’s Millions was published in 2014. The Death of Mr. Baltisberger was published in 1975. Little Town Where Time Stood Still was published in 1989.

This is the title of a short story as well as the collection in which it is found (alternately titled Cinnamon Shops). It is by the Jewish author Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). The Street of Crocodiles was published in 1934.

Günter Grass wrote The Flounder (1977). Ludmilla Petrushevskaya wrote There once lived a girl who seduced her sister's husband, and he hanged himself : love stories (2013). Milorad Pavić wrote Landscape Painted with Tea (1988). Fernando Pessoa wrote The Book of Disquiet (1982).

The general consensus among scholars reflects that Shakespeare derived his story and main characters for Romeo and Juliet from Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe depicts two tragic lovers who are separated by their families, who do not approve of their marriage. They communicate their love through a cement wall and plan to meet under a tree outside to confess their love. However, when Thisbe comes out first, she mistakes the blood of a lion for Pyramus' blood and, believing he had been killed, kills herself.

The excerpt is taken from a poem by Edmund Spenser, who lived during the second half of the sixteenth century. Though he was a contemporary of Early Modern poets like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Spenser utilized deliberately archaic language that may seem like something that one would be more likely to find in Chaucer's poetry.

Passage adapted from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, I.xiv.1-9 (1590)

This is the famous epilogue from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623).

Christopher Marlowe wrote Dr. Faustus (1604). Thomas Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedie (1587). Ben Jonson wrote Every Man in his Humour (1598). Sir Walter Raleigh wrote "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (approx. 1598).

While The Tempest (1623) isn’t strictly considered one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, it also doesn’t fit into an easy category like tragedy, comedy, or history. While the play was originally billed as a comedy in Elizabethan times, it has since been recategorized by most scholars.