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Here's the latest instalment in the regular best-of-quarter collections, intended to gather some links to particularly good Literature Q&A for showcasing our site.

One use for this post could be to gather links for promotion on Literature's community-run Twitter account. But it's also useful for any kind of site promotion - for example, if we want to show off the site to literary friends, it'll be much easier if we have a list of particularly great posts to point to.

Please nominate some exemplary Q&A from the fourth quarter (Oct/Nov/Dec) of 2022.

(Also, if you find anything from previous months, feel free to go and post answers on any of the older posts linked above. Some of them still have no answers, and late entries are always welcome, as long as the nominated main-site post is within the required period.)

  • When choosing nominations, please remember the primary purpose: to showcase our site to people elsewhere in the hope of maybe tempting them to come here. Let's try to focus mainly on great questions with great answers, and perhaps also great unanswered questions (which we can advertise as "hey, why not come and answer this") - not anything with subpar answers, which will tend to give a bad impression and defeat the purpose.
  • Remember that votes don't necessarily reflect quality, and the purpose of this is to promote quality over score. Highly-voted posts are easy to find, underappreciated gems less so.
  • Getting a wide range of different stories represented in our list here would also be nice, but not strictly necessary - feel free to nominate a bunch of Q&A about the same book, if you think they're all outstanding. But don't nominate questions just because they're about your favourite book.
  • Multiple nominated posts per answer here is fine.
  • Feel free to nominate either some of your own posts which you're particularly proud of, or posts from other people which really impressed you.
  • Ideally, some explanation of why the nominated questions and answers are so good would be useful - constructive feedback might give people ideas about what to aim for in the future.

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Just within the time-frame (11th of October) I'd like to nominate a very nice three-way collaboration: Trying to find a poem called "The Boaster". The quest began with Rand al'Thor finding a reference in an old and dusty BBC discussion forum. I picked up the thread and traced the music to an advertisement on eBay, and finally Gareth Rees located the original Czech folksong. It was a lovely example of people working together, and wresting clues from the most improbable of places.

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This was going to be an "excellent new user" answer, but then I realised that her previous posts were in 2021. Anyway, Alice posted a great answer to What's the term for multiple levels of reality in a fictional work?

While searching through my own appreciative comments from the last quarter, I found several excellent answers from Clara Diaz Sanchez, including to a couple of questions that I'd tried to answer with less success: Has there ever been a stage production of Chapter 15 of Ulysses? and What did Lem find in his game-theoretical analysis of the writings of Marquis de Sade?

Late edit to this meta answer (after some upvotes already happened), but I also want to highlight new user Lewis 010, who provided several great answers in November 2022, showing deep insight into the history of literature: Origin of "The bells! The bells!" quote and Was it so unusual for the time for Journey's End to have no leading lady? and When did detective fiction become primarily about murder? are all worth highlighting.

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