To read William Burroughs is to discover a different world where people speak a different language -- a world you thought existed but never knew you thought existed. It is a place where borders are temporary, even viscous: bodies ooze and slime, semen flows freely, erections leap across the pages, an

Beats, Cartoonish, Cyberpunk fiction, Distorted, Experimental, Funny, Grotesque, Improvised, Perverse, Postmodern fiction, Profane, Psychedelic, Quirky, Surreal

"I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk." This dark inspiration led Umberto Eco to begin his career as novelist at the somewhat tardy age of 46. Already established as one of the world's leading semioticians, a lecturer in constant demand, and a thin

Dense, Layered, Lush, Mathematical, Postmodern fiction, Semiotics

A historian of the Swirling Surface, Foucault was not really a philosopher -- in fact, he completely rejected the concept of philosophy. His work is historiographic; he wrote histories of madness, of the medical clinic, of the modern prison, of sexuality. Yet, at the risk of angering his ghost, we mu

Cultural studies/new historicism, Deconstructive, Event, Flux, Funny, Homoerotic, Political, Poststructuralism, Power

Imagine holding the end of a live wire in each hand. Now imagine one end is shaped like a turtle and the other end is, let's say, Pavarotti's beard. Now bring them together. Feel that electricity? That's called art -- or at least it's a metaphor for the Surrealist art of Max Ernst. Ernst explain

Dada, Hallucinatory, Polychromatic, Psychedelic, Saturated, Surreal, Surrealist art, Surrealist literature, Tense