The Prime Minister at the time, Zhu Rongji, happened to be giving a press conference the day it was awarded, and he congratulated the laureate: "I am very pleased that a literary oeuvre written in Chinese was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Next up... Anton Webern, suggested by a friend to encourage me to dip my toe into more challenging musical waters, and enticing because Webern was such a perfectionist and wrote with such compression that his entire oeuvre, written over almost 40 years, fits on about six CDs.
As a result, his published oeuvre, written in Polish and German, is relatively small.
Now, though, when I reread A Christmas Memory, I feel grateful for its innate humanity and its rich, evocative language that might have ensured Capote a place among great literary stylists even if he hadn't written his adult oeuvre.
The entirety of Baldwin's written and on-camera oeuvre eventually mixes down to a roux, and while Peck uses the occasional chapter break, the effect is more of a Chris Marker-like cine-essay than typical Frontline-like reporter's documentary.
Born in Brooklyn in 1865, Chambers wrote widely, his oeuvre encompassing romantic fiction and adventure novels.
Collected Poems Written and read by Seamus Heaney Faber £50, approx 15 hrs Heaney's entire oeuvre from 1966, written with his "squat pen" and read in his thick, soft voice.
But usually, nothing of the chef's oeuvre had been written down except perhaps a master recipe for stock, designed for a trained kitchen staff and made in 40-gallon quantities.
Two of the most perceptive critics of Beyoncé's oeuvre -- Jody Rosen, who's written for Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, and Sasha Frere-Jones, the pop music critic of the New Yorker -- have run out of superlatives to describe Bey's sound.
If Seamus Heaney's oeuvre were revealed to have been written by a Portuguese guy living in Toronto, or if Anne Sexton were actually a mild-mannered soccer mom, it would disrupt our entire sense of their poetry.
