Ernest Hemingway: a fish scaler
Arthur Conan Doyle: tobacco pipe and matches
Charles Dickens: a stiff chimney brush
Charlotte Brontë: a child’s toy from the 1800s
Emily Brontë: brambles
Anne Brontë: a child’s toy and brambles
Edgar Allan Poe: feathers (black)
Roald Dahl: a wrapped chocolate bar
F. Scott Fitzgerald: champagne and coupe glass
Nathaniel Hawthorne: needle and thread (red)
Mary Shelley: needle and thread, and a hunk of unidentified flesh
Agatha Christie: fossil and feather duster
Herman Melville: blubber
Jane Austen: a party invitation (amiable)
Gabriel García Márquez: a plant that’s growing at an unnatural rate
Vladimir Nabokov: cork board and insect pins
Leo Tolstoy: a chess set
Toni Morrison: the ghost of a child who’s holding a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize and rattling them together
A. A. Milne: honeycomb
James Joyce: no prop, but he tells you about his day in great detail
David Foster Wallace: no prop, but the video goes on FOREVER
Murasaki Shikibu: Buddhist nun costume and you’re the emperor who’s dying from venereal disease
Alexandre Dumas: prisoner costume and you’re the confidant he whispers to through iron bars
Maya Angelou: calypso dancer costume, and she’s about to go onstage and show these kids how it’s done
John Steinbeck: tumbleweed
Virginia Woolf: a letter to Vita
J.R.R. Tolkien: lembas bread, plus the whole video is in elvish
Fyodor Dostoevsky: hatchet and whetstone
Don DeLillo: a noise machine
Marquis De Sade: honestly, you don’t want to know
Sylvia Plath: bees