Baroque, Beautiful , Composed, Dense, Elegant, Essays, Implosive, Layered, Playful, Postmodern fiction, Repetition, Science fiction, Surreal, Surrealist literature, Whimsical

Whether the pond she's skating across is folk, pop-rock, or jazz, Joni Mitchell attacks song with an unfailing ear for off-kilter melody and poetically sparked lyrics. Her thirty-plus years as a musician have seen her experiment with many styles and join forces with players from Neil Young to Charles

Dreamy, Elegant, Feminine, Intimate, Religious, Sincere, Women's literature

Roland Barthes gleefully eluded any attempt to reduce or classify his thought. He was instrumental in spreading word of Structuralism and Semiotics both within and beyond the academy. His "Mythologies" -- a series of pithy readings covering everything from wrestling to soap ads -- remains a canonical

Eclectic, Homoerotic, Layered, Semiotics, Structuralism

"Nothing is worse," Nietzsche once said, "than the smell of an ill-constituted soul." For this professor of Classics and son of a Protestant minister, things were not hidden, there were no secrets: the world revealed itself. From this base of materialism and realism, Nietzsche assaulted Christianity,

Bombast, Clever, Discourse as event, Dramatic, Epic, Euphoric, Flux, Joyful, Melancholy, Overflowing, Philosophy, Poststructuralism, Profane, Surface, Witty