Kobo Abe stands out dramatically from his contemporaries in postwar Japanese literature. His works bear no resemblence to the subjective, ultra-realistic and autobiographical style that characterizes a great deal of postwar literature in general and postwar Japanese literature in particular. (10 books, 12 links)
Kathy Acker's contribution as a post beat writer and feminist is a unique and irreplaceable one, if sometimes unacknowledged one, that always manages to make so much of everything else look like foolishness. Kathy remained always out on her own, a strange girl blown out towards the thresholds of language and thought, an intense and anomalous depth of tangles and alterities. She stood nonpareil in a time so marked by the rescinding of new thought and intellectual decay. (19 books, 8 links)
Aguilera-Malta is one of those whom García Márquez cites as an influence in his use of Magic Realism. (3 books, 0 links)
Kathleen Alcalá is a Chicana writer whose trilogy on nineteenth century Mexico was published by Chronicle Books. Her work has received the Western States Book Award, the Governor's Writers Award, and a Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Award, among others. She is also a co-founder and contributing editor to the Raven Chronicles. She is currently a writer in residence at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle. (5 books, 6 links)
Alexie planned to be a doctor until he "fainted three times in human anatomy class and needed a career change." That change was fueled when he stumbled into a poetry workshop at WSU. Encouraged by poetry teacher Alex Kuo, Alexie excelled at writing and realized he'd found his new career choice. Shortly after graduating in American Studies from WSU, Alexie received the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship in 1991 and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1992. (15 books, 9 links)
Paula Gunn Allen is a poet, novelist and critic. (12 books, 0 links)
Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer born in Perú in 1943. Her father, who was serving as a Chilean diplomat in El Peru when Isabel was born, was the brother of Salvador Allende, the President of Chile overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup d' etat on September 11, 1973. As a result of that event, Isabel and her family were forced into exile. Indeed, the idea of exile has been a powerful molding force in the writing of Allende. Exile as a literary theme, is clearly present in all of Allende's works, especially Eva Luna, Of Love and Shadows, and the autobiographical Paula. (26 books, 6 links)
Jorge Amado became the best known and most popular writer in Brazil. He wrote over 25 novels which were translated into 48 languages and stayed on bestseller lists in 52 countries. His novels portray life and customs in the Northeastern region of Brazil. (24 books, 7 links)
Rudolfo Anaya lives and breathes the landscape of the Southwest. It is a powerful force, full of magic and myth, integral to his writings. Anaya, however, is a native Hispanic fascinated by cultural crossings unique to the Southwest, a combination of oldSpain and New Spain, of Mexico with Mesoamerica and the anglicizing forces of the twentieth century. Rudolfo Anaya is widely acclaimed as the founder of modern Chicano literature. (21 books, 4 links)
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas is considered to be one of Latin America's most innovative and provocative late-twentieth-century literary voices. A prolific writer who overcame enormous persecution and censorship, Arenas wrote novels, short stories, poetry, theater pieces, and essays. Francisco Soto's Reinaldo Arenas is not only the first comprehensive review in English to examine and analyze the major works of Arenas, but it is also the first to trace the articulation of homoerotic themes and issues in the Cuban writer's oeuvre. (13 books, 5 links)
Guatemalan poet, novelist, diplomat, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967. Asturias's writings combine the mysticism of the Maya with epic impulse toward social protest. Asturias spent much of his life in exile because of his public opposition to dictatorial rule. (6 books, 4 links)
Atxaga has played a leading role in the modernization of Basque literature and is the first writer in the Basque language to achieve an international reputation. Atxaga frequently translates his own work into Spanish, from which it's been translated into dozens of other languages. (5 books, 2 links)
His work is unusual in that it is the fusion of four distinct traditions: Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish and French. (7 books, 4 links)
"Barthelme happens to be one of a handful of American authors, there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight 'reality.'"--Thomas Pynchon (14 books, 4 links)
Peter Damian Bellis lives in Minnesota with his wife and two children. His work has appeared in Spilled Ink, the Blue Moon Review, and In Vivo. (2 books, 2 links)
Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of North Africaís most successful post-colonial writers. (7 books, 3 links)
Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending. (2 books, 8 links)
Bishop's poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life, and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world. Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. (11 books, 7 links)
The works of Maria Luisa Bombal have been increasingly read and understood as keys to the development of feminist styles, thematics, and thought. (3 books, 1 links)
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As a poet, essayist, and short-story writer, he became one of the first Latin American writers to achieve international fame. (73 books, 6 links)
"Brautigan is good for you. No writer you can think of is quite like him today, nor was any writer anytime - unless you can imagine the kind of things Mark Twain might have written had he wandered into a field of ripe cannabis with a pack of Zig Zag papers in his pocket. That's about as close as I can come to Brautigan, a kind of cracker-barrel surrealist whose humor is essentially Nineteenth-Century Western American."--Bruce Cook (19 books, 5 links)
Andre Breton was a French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, chief promoter and one of the founders of Surrealist movement with Paul Eluard, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali among others. Breton's manifestoes of Surrealism are the most important theoretical statements of the movement. (21 books, 3 links)
Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley’s Girl, The Gifts of the Body, What Keeps Me Here, and The Dogs. She lives in Seattle. (21 books, 0 links)
Native San Franciscan and feminist writer Dorothy Bryant is the author of 12 novels, two nonfiction works, and four plays. "A Day in San Francisco" is Bryant's controversial mother-son take on gay life in the City on the eve of the 1980 Gay Freedom Day Parade. Her 1986 novel "Confessions of Madame Psyche" is so realistic in emotional truth and historic detail about early 20th Century life in San Francisco and the Bay Area that most readers forget this is a fictional work. Bryant, the daughter of northern Italian immigrants, taught English and music in high schools and community colleges for 23 years. She lives in Berkeley, where she and her husband run the independent publishing company, Ata Books. (12 books, 0 links)
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in 1891 in Kiev, today the capital of Ukraine. His father was a professor at the Theological Academy. After finishing high school, Bulgakov entered the Medical School of Kiev University, graduating in 1916. In 1913 he married Tatyana Lappa, who moved with him after graduation to provincial villages, where he practiced medicine. He wrote about his experiences as a doctor in his early works "Notes on Cuffs" and "Notes of a Young Country Doctor." (1 books, 10 links)
William Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine. After his graduation from Harvard, he lived in Chicago and New York on an income of two hundred dollars a month from his parents. He met Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg in New York City around Christmas 1943 shortly after Ginsberg began studying at Columbia, and Burroughs impressed them with his erudition, as well as his sardonic humor and reserved poise. Older than the others in the group, he took on the role of teacher, encouraging Kerouac and Ginsberg in their attempts to write fiction and poetry. (52 books, 0 links)
(Janet) Taylor Caldwell (1900-1985) - wrote under the preudonyms Marcus Holland and Max Reiner - original name J. Miriam Reback. Was a prolific author of popular fiction, who used often in her works real historical events or persons. (43 books, 1 links)
Italo Calvino (1923-1985), one of Europe's greatest and most popular writers, was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was a member of the partisan movement during the German occupation of northern Italy in World War II. (29 books, 0 links)
Carey's left-field sensibility and style have matured into serious fiction with a lightly ironic touch. He has won the Booker Prize twice: for Oscar And Lucinda and, in 2001, the much more readable - despite its lack of commas - True History of the Kelly Gang, fictional letters from the Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly. (18 books, 0 links)
1904–80, Cuban novelist and musicologist. As a political exile in Paris between 1928 and 1939, Carpentier was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud, Jacques Prévert, and the surrealists. Reflecting his deep commitment to revolutionary politics, his novels explore the irrational elements of the Latin American world, its rich variety of cultures, and the possibility of its magical transformation. Widely regarded as one of the greatest modern Latin American writers, Carpentier was also important as a theorist of the region’s literature and historian of its music. (16 books, 0 links)
English short story writer, novelist, journalist, dramatist and critic. Carter was a notable exponent of magic realism, who added into it Gothic themes, violence, and eroticism. Carter utilized throughout her career the language and characteristic motifs of the fantasy genre. "A good writer can make you believe time stands still," she once said. Her work represents a successful combination of postmodern literary theories and feminist politics. Carter died in 1992 at the age of fifty-two. (25 books, 5 links)
Cultural anthropologist, author; born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Educated at the University of California: Los Angeles (B.A. 1962; Ph.D. 1970), he published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), which he claimed was based on his five-year apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. (The Yaqui live in northwestern Mexico and bordering U.S. states.) Because Castaneda was so elusive, and because the book was taken up by young people at a time when numerous such mystical traditions were in fashion, many professionals cast doubt on the authenticity of the book's contents. When he followed it with a series of equally popular books, including A Separate Reality (1971) and Tales of Power (1975), even more questions were raised as to how much of his work was true anthropology and how much was his own creation. (25 books, 3 links)
Spanish novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Among the writers to emerge after the Spanish civil war, he won critical acclaim with the novel La familia de Pascual Duarte. Its brutal realism and crudeness of language are characteristic of Cela's style. Cela won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989 and Spain's highest literary award, the Cervantes Prize, in 1995. (27 books, 3 links)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born Alcalá, Spain. Early in his career Cervantes was a soldier and suffered serious wounds, one of which almost carried away his left hand. Cervantes is, of course famous for his book, Don Quixote. Tradition has it that he wrote it while in prison at Argamasilla in La Manchia. The book was first published in 1605; a second part came out in 1615. (19 books, 5 links)
Patrick Chamoiseau was born in 1953 in Fort de France, Martinique, where he now lives. He studied law in Paris. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under Bonaparte and two non-fiction works: In Praise of Creoleness and To Write in a Dominated Country. His novels are Chronique des sept miseres, Solibo le magnifique and, most recently, Texaco. He has also published a volume of Caribbean folk tales and a memoir of his childhood. In 1992 Patrick Chamoiseau was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Texaco. (8 books, 0 links)
American short story writer and novelist, called the "Chekhov of the suburbs". Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described the manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision. Although he often used his family as material, his daughter Susan Cheever has reminded that "of course none of us expected accuracy from my father. He made his living by making up stories." (18 books, 8 links)
Paulo Coelho once said that following your dream is like learning a foreign language; you will make mistakes but you will get there in the end. In 1988, he published The Alchemist, a novel that explores this theme, and it launched him as an international bestselling author. Specifically, Paulo Coelho is recognized for his powerful storytelling technique and the profound spiritual insights he blends seamlessly into his parables. (17 books, 2 links)
Guadeloupean author of epic fiction, best-known for her historical novel Segu. Condé's novels question stereotypical images of literary characters, colonialism, sex and gender. (19 books, 0 links)
Cortázar said this about himself: "Much of what I have written falls into the category of eccentricity, because I have never admitted a clear distinction between living and writing; if in my life I have managed to disguise an only partial participation in my circumstances, I still cannot deny that eccentricity in what I write, since I write precisely because I am only half there or not there at all. I write by default and dislocation, and since I write out of an interstice I always invite others to discover one of their own and to see for themselves the garden where the trees bear fruits that turn out to be precious stones. The monster remains the same." (49 books, 2 links)
John Crowley was born in 1942 and has worked in documentary films and TV since 1966. The Deep, his first sf novel, was published in 1975 and was followed by Beasts, Engine Summer and Great Work of Time. In his later work, Little, Big, Aegypt and Love and Sleep, he has moved into writing fantasy to great critical acclaim. (22 books, 0 links)
In an interview with NPR, Danticat said: "I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, . . . poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles." (7 books, 12 links)
de Melo was a Brazilian poet and dramatist. Raised on his family's sugarcane plantation, he entered the foreign service in 1945 and retired in 1990. Eschewing both free verse and traditional lyric forms, Cabral likened poetry to manual labor and fit (somewhat uneasily) with fellow Brazilian postmodern writers of the “Generation of 1945.” (1 books, 0 links)
Understated, lyrical, and intensely imagistic, De Rosa’s tale of Italian ghetto life stands out from other immigrant narratives by virtue of its artistry. (2 books, 0 links)
Desnos, one of the earliest and best French surrealists, attempted to subvert normal ideas of order by using tarot cards, trances, and hallucinogenic mushrooms as aids to composition. (3 books, 0 links)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author and poet. Her work is widely known, as she has been published in over 50 magazines, and her writing has been included in over 30 anthologies. (5 books, 0 links)
She was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in literary journals nationwide. She is the author of a novel, "Madam Fate", and a poetry collection, "Electricity Comes To Cocoa Bottom". Currently, she teaches Creative Writing at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. (3 books, 0 links)
Katherine Dunn has come a long way from the teenage girl who ran away from home, joined a cult-like magazine-sales crew, and ended up in jail at age eighteen for passing a bad check. The author, who is now 50 years-old and lives in Portland, Oregon, is one of the most original and powerful female voices in contemporary American literature. Her stunning third novel, Geek Love (Knopf, 1983), was nominated for a national book award, and with it Dunn attracted a cult-like following herself. (11 books, 0 links)
Italian literary critic, novelist, semiotician, who gained international fame with his intellectual detective story The Name of the Rose, a book about books. As a semiotician Eco is know for his contribution to the theoretical study of signs encompassing all cultural phenomena. Much of his study, including A Theory of Semiotics (1976), has been on the development of a methodology of communication. (0 books, 0 links)
Eimers writes of the horror of human existence in all its guises. She focuses on the terrible events of history--the Holocaust, Hiroshima--as well as the insidious states of feeling, such as loneliness, fear, emptiness, which comprise our everyday lives. (2 books, 3 links)
At 28, Erdrich published her first novel "Love Medicine" -- which had been rejected by numerous publishing houses -- when her husband, the author Michael Dorris, resubmitted it, posing as her literary agent. Despite a modest first print run, "Love Medicine" was a phenomenal word-of-mouth success, selling 400,000 copies in hardback and winning the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. (24 books, 1 links)
Laura Esquivel wrote the book and screenplay for Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate) which swept the Ariel awards of the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures, winning eleven in all, and went on to become the largest grossing foreign film ever released in the United States. (9 books, 1 links)
More than simply a renowned Mississippi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer is acclaimed throughout the world as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, (62 books, 0 links)
Born in Toronto in 1930 and self-educated after grade 10, Timothy Findley worked as an actor for 15 years before full-time writing in 1962. After novels, short fiction--plus drama and documentary for radio, television and film--he re-entered the theatre as a playwright. (18 books, 5 links)
French novelist of the realist school. As a writer Flaubert was a perfectionist, who did not make a distinction between a beautiful or ugly subject: all was in the style. (36 books, 0 links)
In an absurdist style, Foos takes on the issue of the pressure women face to bear children, and forces us to take a good look at what some circles still consider taboo. (4 books, 0 links)
Connie is an environmental activist in Florida. (5 books, 1 links)
New Zealand novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer. (19 books, 0 links)
Carlos Fuentes is one of Latin America's most prominent men of letters. He is an essayist and literary historian of the highest caliber, as well as the author of numerous screenplays, dramas, and short stories; however, Fuentes is best known for his novels, which use complex and innovative narrative techniques to probe Mexican history. (61 books, 0 links)
Peter Gadol studied at Harvard with Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler. (5 books, 1 links)
Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5,1898; died near Granada, August 19,1936, García Lorca is Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poet and dramatist. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). (27 books, 0 links)
Gabriel García Márquez is a major Colombian novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. His masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a family saga that mirrors the history of Colombia. Like many of his works, it is set in the fictional town of Macondo, a place much like García Márquez's native Aracataca. Mixing realism and fantasy, the novel is both the story of the decay of the town and an ironic epic of human experience. (42 books, 8 links)
Great Russian novelist, dramatist, satirist, founder of the so-called critical realism in Russian literature. (5 books, 0 links)
German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor and printmaker. (39 books, 0 links)
Soviet prose writer notable for his romantic short stories of adventure and mystery. (1 books, 0 links)
Brazilian novelist who combines naturalism with psychological analysis. (3 books, 0 links)
Rodney has a passionate concern with Australia's failure as a nation to come to terms with the decimation and dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples. His books, including poetry, non-fiction and works for the theatre, are available in half a dozen translations. Rodney has twice won the Miles Franklin Award, served as Chair of the Australia Council and been honoured with membership of the Order of Australia. (13 books, 0 links)
Joanne Harris is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Blackberry Wine and Chocolat, which was nominated for the Whitbread Award, one of Britain's most prestigious literary prizes. Half French and half British, Harris lives in England. (5 books, 0 links)
If Henry Miller, S.J. Perelman and Walt Whitman had holed up in a Michigan roadhouse to concoct a mystery yarn, the resulting melange of cosmic erotica, snappish humor and hirsute lyricism might resemble Warlock by poet and novelist Jim Harrison. (1 books, 0 links)
Novelist and short story writer, a central figure in the American Renaissance. Hawthorne looked not only to the Puritan origins of American history, but also to Puritan styles of rhetoric to create a distinctive American literary voice. (22 books, 0 links)
Bessie Head, one of Africa's most prominent writers, was born in South Africa in 1937. The child of an "illicit" union between a Scottish woman and a black man, Head was taken from her mother at birth and raised in a foster home until the age of thirteen. Head then attended missionary school and eventually became a teacher. Abandoning teaching after only a few years, Head began writing for the Golden City Post. In 1964, personal problems led her to take up a teaching post in Botswana, where Head remained in "refugee" status for fifteen years before gaining citizenship. All three of her major novels along with other works were written in Botswana during this period. Bessie Head died in Botswana in 1986 at the young age of forty-nine. (10 books, 0 links)
Mark Helprin, a novelist, is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. (10 books, 0 links)
Felisberto Hernández was born in Montevideo; a talented pianist, he worked for many years playing in the silent-screen theaters and cafés of Uruguay, before becoming a government employee. (2 books, 0 links)
Professor Jack Hodgins was born in 1938 and raised in Merville in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island. After attending the University of British Columbia he taught high school English in Nanaimo, before accepting teaching positions at a number of Canadian universities. He is now a member of the faculty at the University of Victoria, Brittish Columbia, where he teaches Creative Writing. (9 books, 0 links)
In a prolific career that began with early writings in the American Review, Alice Hoffman has expanded and developed the idea of family and community -- the forces that bind it together and the forces that drive it apart -- with understated and elegant prose and powerful and complex characters. (2 books, 0 links)
Austrian poet, dramatist, and essayist, who became internationally famous for his collaboration with the German composer Richard Strauss. After World War I Hofmannsthal founded with Max Reinhardt the Salzburg Festival, which have given regularly performances of Hofmannsthal's plays. Hoffmannsthal entered the literary scene very young, at the age of 16. (3 books, 0 links)
Hulme blends naturalism and poetry, and shows her deep understanding of the spiritual legacy of Maori culture. (4 books, 3 links)
Peter Høeg is a respected Danish author. (7 books, 0 links)
American-born writer, gifted with talents in literature, psychology, and philosophy. James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of literary criticism. His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne. James once said that he learned more of the craft of writing from Balzac "than from anyone else". (5 books, 0 links)
Janet Kaplan's poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, and The Monitor Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, among others. A limited-edition chapbook of her poetry, The Solid Ground, was published in September 1996 by the Premier Poets Chapbook Series in Rhode Island. Janet Kaplan attended Lehman College and Columbia University, and earned her MFA degree in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including fellowships at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois. In 1991 she won the Bronx Council on the Arts' BRIO Award for Excellence in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at Hofstra University. (4 books, 0 links)
First Japanese novelist, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many of Kawabata's book explore melancholically the place of sex in culture and people's lives. His works combined old Japan's beauty with modernist trends, realism with surrealistic visions. (1 books, 0 links)
Kingston's first language was Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese. She grew up surrounded by other immigrants from her father's village, and the storytelling she heard as a child influenced her later writing. By the age of nine, her progress in English enabled her to write poems in her new language, and though she was a gifted storyteller like her mother, she preferred the solitary task of writing. (10 books, 0 links)
Kinsella writes primarily about baseball and Indians, but he is quick to point out that he is neither an Indian nor a baseball player. He grew up in Canada, an only child, in almost total isolation on a farm in Northern Alberta. (17 books, 0 links)
The Chilean poet, and diplomat, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda is the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. From the 1940s on, his works reflected the political struggle of the left and the socio-historical developments in South America. He also wrote love poems. Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) have sold over a million copies since it first appeared. (44 books, 3 links)
Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." (75 books, 0 links)
Thomas Pynchon is a reclusive American novelist possessed by a certain eclectic genius, an architect of literary structures that range from immense tesseracts to tiny, perfect gems. (7 books, 0 links)
Click here for thousands of Catholic items from Aquinas and More. François Rabelais The life of this celebrated French writer is full of obscurities. He was born at Chinon in Touraine in 1483, 1490. or 1495. According to some his father was an apothecary, according to others a publican or inn-keeper. He began his studies with the Benedictines and finished them with the Franciscans near Angers. He became a Franciscan in the convent of Gontenay-le-Comte, where he remained fifteen years and received Holy orders. But the spirit of his order not being favourable to the studies then esteemed by the Renaissance and for which he himself displayed great aptitude, he left the convent. (8 books, 0 links)
Sue Reidy is a fiction writer distinctive for her complex treatment of female identity and spirituality. (2 books, 0 links)
Prolific literary critic, scholar, poet, and diplomat, one of the leading essayist from Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. Reyes deeply influenced an entire generation of writers in his native land and elsewhere in Latin America. (2 books, 0 links)
The most important German poet of the first years of the twentieth century. (5 books, 0 links)
French author, literature theoretician, and representative of the nouveau roman - the new novel. Robbe-Grillet's works lack the conventional elements, such as dramatic plotting, coherent concept of time, and psychological analysis of the character. The novels are composed largely of recurring images, impersonally depicted physical objects and random events of everyday life. (1 books, 0 links)
Mercè Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908, and fled into exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Finally able to return to Barcelona in the early 80's, she died there in 1983. (1 books, 0 links)
The first Indian citizen to win the prestigious booker prize and a million dollar book deal has made Arundhati Roy, a celebrity and a tall literary lioness persona. (7 books, 8 links)
Anglo-Indian novelist, who uses in his works tales from various genres - fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition. (16 books, 6 links)
Portuguese writer, who has combined is his work myths, history of his own country, and surrealistic imagination. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998. Other names from Portugal, often mentioned in Nobel Prize speculations, have been António Lobo Antunes, and José Cardoso Pires. "The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels," Saramago has said. (13 books, 0 links)
Writer and graphic artist, whose brief career ended tragically during World War II, when he was gunned down by a German officer in the ghetto of Drohobycz. Schulz is best-known for his short stories. His is considered one of the finest Polish prose stylists of the 20th century. (6 books, 0 links)
At the age of sixteen Mary ran away to live with the twenty-one year old Percy Shelley, the unhappily married radical heir to a wealthy baronetcy. To Mary, Shelley personified the genuis and dedication to human betterment that she had admired her entire life. Although she was cast out of society, even by her father, this inspirational liasion produced her masterpiece, Frankenstein. (5 books, 0 links)
Amos Tutuola, a tribesman of the Yoruba people in Nigeria and author of several books, most notably The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and The Brave African Huntress, is one of the best writers of fantasy in world literature. (8 books, 0 links)
Peruvian novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist, literary critic, one of the central writers in the Hispanic world. Vargas Llosa started his literary career in Europe, but most of his novels are set in Peru. (29 books, 0 links)
Katherine Vaz, an Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Davis, is the author of Saudade , which received critical acclaim as the first contemporary novel from a major New York publisher about Portuguese-Americans. (2 books, 0 links)
1838–89, French novelist. His works, in the romantic style, are often fantastic in plot and filled with mystery and horror. Important among them are the drama Axel (revision, 1890), the novel L’Éve future (1886), and the short-story collection, Contes cruels (1883, tr. Sardonic Tales, 1927). (1 books, 0 links)
William T. Vollmann is the author of several highly acclaimed volumes of fiction. He is one of today's most prolific writers. In an article in the New Republic, Sven Birkerts estimated that in the past ten years Vollmann has published an estimated 5,000 pages. (2 books, 0 links)
Kurt Vonnegut combines science fiction, social satire, and black comedy in his novels, which won a wide following during the 1960s. Vonnegut's themes spring from his contemplation of 20th-century horrors: dehumanization in a technological society, and the random destructiveness of modern war. (12 books, 9 links)
Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. (29 books, 2 links)
Sheila Watson is best know for her modernist novel, The Double Hook. With her husband, poet, Wilfred Watson, she founded the literary magazine, White Pelican, in Edmonton where they both taught English at the University of Alberta and were very popular professors. (4 books, 2 links)
Samoan novelist, poet, and educator, who has promoted creative writing across the Pacific. Albert Wendt is probably the best-known writer in the South Pacific. Although his works are deeply rooted in the heritage of the Oceanic culture, they also reflect the common experience of people everywhere. (10 books, 3 links)
American writer who satirized the American dream and saw that liberty and freedom have been turned into a bizarre nightmare. West attracted posthumously attention after World War II first in France. He was fascinated by what he called 'the secret inner life of masses', where the power of unfilled desires always threatens to turn into malignant violence. West died in a car crash at thirty-seven. (5 books, 7 links)
Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. (44 books, 8 links)
Wilder's breakthrough novel was The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, an examination of justice and altruism. The story focused on the fates of five travelers in the 18-century Peru, who happen to be crossing the finest bridge in the land when it breaks and throws them into the gulf below. A scholarly monk, Brother Juniper, interprets the story of each victim in an attempt to explain the working of divine providence. Surely, he argues, if there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in human life, it could be discovered mysteriously latent in the lives of those particular people. But his book being done the text is pronounced heretical and and both Juniper and his work are burned by the Inquisition. (22 books, 2 links)
It is too easy to label, and Winterson (in essay and in fiction) resists the confines implied in the rubber stamps of "feminist", "lesbian" and "postmodern," in spite of the persistence with which pundits apply them. (10 books, 7 links)
Before her death, Virginia would publish an extraordinary amount of ground breaking material. She was a renowned member of the Bloomsbury group and a leader of the modernist literary movement. Over the course of many illnesses, the most notable publications of Virginia's were Night and Day, The Mark on the Wall, Jacob's Room, Monday or Tuesday, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts. She had intense powers of concentration which allowed her to work ten to twelve hour days. In total, she accumulated a treasure chest of work, containing five volumes of collected essays and reviews, two biographies (Flush and Roger Fry), two libertarian books, a volume of selections from her diary, nine novels, and a volume of short stories. In March of 1941, Woolf left a suicide note behind for her husband and sister before drowning herself in a nearby river. She feared her madness was returning and that she would not be able to continue writing. She wished to spare her loved ones. The time was World War II England; she and Leonard had sworn to commit suicide if the Nazis had invaded. (67 books, 16 links)
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