The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman is a novel by Ernest J. Gaines about Jane Pittman, an African American woman who recalls her life from the Civil War through the beginning of the Vietnam war. Like many freed slaves, the protagonists of the novel suffered a new form of slavery under the sharecropping system and continued to be oppressed in the Jim Crow era. The novel focuses on the struggles and sacrifices of blacks to escape slavery and racism, dying in wars as well as the Civil Rights movement.
The Pit and the Pendulum is a short story which follows an unnamed narrator who has been imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition. His captors lock him in a dark prison where they torture him, tying him down to await a slowly descending scythe and, when that fails to kill him, attempting to force him into a pit where he will fall to his death. The tale instills fear in the reader as the narrator faces his unavoidable death, but nonetheless ends hopefully.
Fever Pitch is the autobiographical story of British author Nick Hornby. It compares, contrasts, and conflates the fortunes of the Arsenal Football Club with the ups and downs in the author's own life. The book is largely a collection of essays about individual matches, with each match scrutinized by Hornby and dissected for symbolic content. Hornby also critically examines his childhood hero-worship of footballers and the different way in which he feels about sporting events as an adult.