In his calloused hands, with dirt under his fingernails, he carried the same torch that Wordsworth and Coleridge had used to set poetry aflame. Raymond Carver employed "the language really used by men" to tell the story of the damaged white American. Broken hearts populate Carver's literary country;

Dark, Distorted, Rough, Smoky, Southern gothic, Spare, Super-realism

Poe once wrote that all worldly things contain "the germ of their inevitable annihilation." Pretty cheerful stuff -- clearly this was a man obsessed with ruin and with death. His characters typically suffer from various forms of mental and physical deterioration; their minds seem to have a predilecti

Anxiety, Dark, Death, Gothic fiction, Grotesque, Intense, Lyrical, Sublime, Symbolist poetry, Violent

Dark, Gritty, Pathos, Political, Realist fiction, Sincere, Urban, Victorian

"The writer is in a god-like relation to what he creates," Martin Amis once mused in an interview. The question that logically follows is: what kind of god is Amis? Well, he is clearly not the god of Leibniz, who could only create the "best of all possible worlds." In fact, the case could easily be m

Catastrophe, Dark, Death, Dystopic, Funny, Ironic, Postmodern fiction, Self-reflection