Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge asks you to identify a novel’s title based on the characters in the text. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.

A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself — or have a lasting influence on an author. With that in mind, this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the final stops for five authors after a life of writing. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.

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By A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for the Book Review. Aliza Aufrichtig is a visual journalist.

March 25, 2026

Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.

Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?

Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.

Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.

Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.

As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.

Are those worlds real?

Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.

Until then, we find consolation in fangles.