In Ralph Waldo Emerson's foundational Transcendentalist essay "Self-Reliance" (1841), he explicitly names Cause and Effect as the "chancellors of God."

Emerson writes: "In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." He argues that true reality is governed strictly by the divine laws of Cause and Effect, not by random chance or luck. Relying on "luck" is foolish; a self-reliant person understands that their own actions (causes) produce their life's outcomes (effects).

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy (1987) is a landmark work of postmodern, metafictional detective fiction. It consists of three short novels:

1. City of Glass (1985)
2. (B) Ghosts (1986)
3. (C) The Locked Room (1986)

Why A and D are wrong: The Book of Illusions is a later novel by Auster (2002). Winter Journal (2012) is an autobiographical memoir by Auster.

Matching major 20th-century authors to their famous memoirs:

A. Pablo Neruda — (iii) Memoirs (Confieso que he vivido / I Confess I Have Lived). The Nobel laureate's posthumously published autobiography detailing his poetry, politics, and exile.

B. Graham Greene — (iv) A Sort of Life. His 1971 autobiography detailing his childhood, struggle with bipolar disorder, and early writing career.

C. Doris Lessing — (i) Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. Detailing her childhood in colonial Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

D. Vladimir Nabokov — (ii) Speak, Memory. His celebrated, highly stylized memoir detailing his aristocratic childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Jorge Luis Borges's masterpiece of magical realism and infinity, "The Library of Babel" (1941), opens with a quote from Robert Burton's 17th-century text, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

The epigraph reads: "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters..." This perfectly sets up the story's premise: a universe consisting of an infinite, hexagonal library containing every possible book that can be generated by the random combination of 25 basic characters (22 letters, the comma, the period, and the space).

In Dostoevsky's famous parable "The Grand Inquisitor" (told by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov), the old Spanish Inquisitor delivers a blistering, multi-page monologue to Jesus Christ.

The Inquisitor argues that Christ's gift of "free will" is too heavy a burden for humanity, and that the Church has fixed Christ's mistake by removing free will and providing humanity with miracle, mystery, and authority instead. Throughout the entire ferocious attack, Christ remains completely silent. At the very end, Christ simply approaches the old man and softly kisses him on his bloodless lips. The kiss represents unconditional divine love and forgiveness that transcends human logic and argument. Stunned, the Inquisitor lets Christ go.