The Wednesday Quiz is a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction

It's:

The Wednesday Quiz, in its third incarnation, is basically the same old weekly game of knowledge, intuition, inductive reasoning, and willingness to risk public embarrassment in a friendly and moderately supportive environment!!  

Traditionally, it is a closed-book quiz.

It is very possible that answers will come out over the weekend.


1. The painter of this piece wasn't ever able to get into art school, and eventually had to give up painting.  He became successful as an author, however, when his one published book became a surprise hit. But he is usually thought of as a political figure.

2. The capital of Jalisco, it's Mexico's second-largest city.

3. The Wiki calls him "a noted polymath... a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat," and notes that "he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics...." Who was this smart dude?

4. All right, this very small African country is one of the few places on the continent where Spanish is a major language, and its 87% Catholic population is a bit of a anomoly as well. Big oil revenues make it a wealthy country on paper, but the wealth is, to put it mildly, highly concentrated. Its human rights record is considered among the world's worst! The mainland is wedged between Gabon and Cameroon, but the biggest city, Malabo, is on Bioko Island, quite a ways to the north. NAME THAT COUNTRY!

5. Numerous movies, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report have been made from this odd science fiction writer's novels and short stories.

6. His other most famous works are Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, and El Salon Mexico.

7. This is a fragment of what ancient language?

8. It was -- according to the Wiki, again -- shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction, the 2001 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the 2001 Whitbread Book Award for Novel. It won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 WH Smith Literary Award, the 2002 Boeke Prize and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel. Time named it the best fiction novel of the year and included it in its All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels, and The Observer cites it as one of the 100 best novels written, calling it "a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction." I liked it too. And its four-part plot is set in motion when a little girl gets confused after witnessing a sexual encounter in the night and accuses a more or less innocent guy of rape.

9. It's that Yiddish word that means "pleasingly plump, buxom, full-figured."

10. So where's this?

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10. For A = 1 to 10
20. Give Answer A in the Comments.
30. Next A
40. End