Sometimes a book comes along that makes you stop and say, “Geez, this author must have done a crazy amount of research.” Like Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (all that yeast!) or Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (all those knots!). Gifted writers can supply an enormous amount of technical information seamlessly and without making it feel like you’re reading the fine print of your new cell phone contract.

Other books make you recognize an author’s expertise in subjects that go beyond what a character might do for a living or what it’s like to be an insomniac. And we aren’t talking about huge fact bombs here (though fact bombs aren’t easy to manufacture), but true insightfulness. It’s the kind of well-informed understanding that makes you think Phillip Roth could teach a Learning Annex course on growing up with an overbearing mother. Here are six courses by famous authors we’d love to audit:

Advanced Communications, Elmore Leonard

Leonard wrote the book on writing with brevity (no, really, he did), famously advising writers to “leave out the stuff that readers tend to skip.” This get-to-the-point style became his hallmark. And with dialogue that’s succinct and almost rhythmic, it’s easy to understand why Hollywood loved him.

Required text: Out of Sight

Studies of Deviant Behavior, Joyce Carol Oates

Violence is ugly. Uglier still is what lies in its wake. Oates writes about both better than just about anyone. Why is her writing so violent? Funny you should ask.

Required texts: We Were the Mulvaneys and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

An Introduction to Sociology, Kurt Vonnegut

For satire to work, the satirist must have a deep understanding of how a society or culture works. Vonnegut had that and more. He used humor and absurdity to draw attention to a character’s flaws, or those of the world they inhabited, so that we could recognize them as our own.

Required texts: Player Piano and Cat’s Cradle

Library Sciences, Jorge Luis Borges

Before he became a famed writer at the helm of the Latin American “Boom,” Borges was a librarian. His vast knowledge of, well, everything figures largely in both his characters and plots. One example is the story “Guayaquil.” Who else but Borges could make a story about two academics arguing about Schopenhauer so exciting?

Required text: Collected Fiction

Gender Studies, William Shakespeare

Considering the role of gender in Shakespeare’s plays, as they were performed in his time, is a one-way ticket on the mind-melt train: male actors played female characters, and sometimes these female characters, played by men, pretended to be men, while male characters, also played by men, pretended to be women. Shakespeare played with the notion of ascribed gender norms way before ascribed gender norms was a thing. Shakespeare: Challenging gender norms since 1623.

Required texts: Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It

Genealogy, Gabriel García Márquez

Are personality traits hereditary? Is predestination real? Is history doomed to repeat itself? What happens when an immortal gypsy crosses your path? Marquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, attempts to answer these questions, among others, with a close examination of the Buendía family. And thank goodness for the included family tree, because a few generations deep, everyone starts to blur together.

Required text: One Hundred Years of Solitude

What class would you like to take from a famous author?