Among the foremost members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno launched a tirade against the modern world. With an arsenal of unsupported assertions strung together without obvious connecting elements, Adorno set out to critique what he called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity consumption. A c

Angry, Dark, Depressive, Dystopic, Frankfurt school, Intense, Marxism/ideology critique, Severe

In July of 1883, an average middle-class Jewish family in an average suburb of Prague (then in Austria) ushered into the average world a new creature: Franz Kafka. He would never forgive them for this unnatural act of torture. Franz kept his neurosis quietly to himself throughout his childhood, r

Absurd, Anxiety, Dreamy, Dystopic, Existentialist literature, Hallucinatory, Hypnotic, Intense, Modernist literature, Neurotic, Profane

Irvine Welsh was born in 1958 in Leith, an area that had been incorporated into Edinburgh in much the same way that Scotland itself had been colonized by England. So his -- and his characters' -- congenital resentment towards the world in general is not too surprising. After dropping out of school at

Dystopic, Funny, Gritty, Low realism, Postmodern fiction, Profane, Slangy, Urban

Enigmatic, magnetic, elusive, and mysterious -- these words and others like them have been employed over the decades to describe actor/playwright Sam Shepard's cryptic persona and plays. After leaving a dead-end town in the middle of a California wasteland, a young Shepard moved to America's biggest

Dystopic, Melancholy, Off-broadway, Primal, Tense, Visceral