Graham Swift seems to have little in common with his literary contemporaries. While most writers these days spatter their novels with pop culture references and play with distortions of time and narrative, Swift sets his books in a nineteenth-century context and tells good old-fashioned stories. He

Contemplative, Death, Dramatic, Paranoid, Tragic

Jane Austen has been reincarnated in the personage of Kazuo Ishiguro. The great novelist of early-nineteenth-century English manners, who observed the moral inconsistencies of the nobility and argued for a form of social meritocracy, could not have hoped for a more loyal and perfect heir to her legac

Composed, Contemplative, Demure, Melancholy, Modernist literature, Tragic

Beaver coats, hooch, Roadsters, flappers, the Charleston, and hot jazz -- all these ingredients blended in the punch bowl that was the Roaring Twenties, the era in which F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were the crown prince and princess of the fast set. The author had gained wealth, excitement

Catastrophe, Charming, Manic, Modernist literature, Opulent, The lost generation, Tragic

Dense, Dreamy, Modernist literature, Tragic, Witty