The narrator of a story finds that this technique occurs four times in Shakespeare’s sonnets before remarking how everything “seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.” For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this literary technique used to recall icicles and a parking meter after the deaths of Sybil and Cynthia Vane.
ANSWER: acrostics
[10e] This author of “The Vane Sisters” is sometimes wrongly credited with inventing the Russian crossword. This author’s character Charles Kinbote goes from live to dead in five while playing “word golf” with John Shade.
ANSWER: Vladimir Nabokov [or Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov; accept Vladimir Sirin] (The clued novel is Pale Fire.)
[10h] In this world, two siblings play a wordplay-heavy game of scrabble called by the anagrammatical name “Flavita.” Endnotes by Vivian Darkbloom explain punning terms from this world’s provinces of Estoty and Canady.
ANSWER: Antiterra [or Demonia; prompt on the world of Ada; prompt on the alternate universe from Ada or equivalents]
<Henry Atkins, American Literature>