Mini Quiz

This post finds its inspiration in a task I always assign to my writing class--a whim I got from a book, a long story, its origin a Gallic quill. An author--call him G.P.--spins a yarn from which a particular thing is missing. Long months past that day, a guy ports it cross-Atlantic, and you can now buy it in a bookshop. This story isn't bad, but what's amazing about it is its form--by limiting his tools, G.P. shows us how to hack unusual paths to innovation in lit. Now and again, a pupil, in doing this task, will whip up a fablous paragraph or two, stunning this prof with truly groovy wordsmithing. OK, OK, it's all a bit stilty, I'll grant you that. But what can you ask for, what with this limitation at hand?

I think a Ward Six fan can probably crack this conundrum, right? For this post is actually a child of this particular task, if a kinda crappy stab at it, anyway. If you know who G.P. is (this task outlaws my saying who), what his book is known by, which country G.P. was from, and what is missing, post it!