"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

For any literary teenager in the '60s, reading Kerouac's "On the Road" was a must. But immediately following that came Hermann Hesse's study of the Buddha's early life, "Siddhartha." It comes as no surprise, for Hesse was one of the major literary influences on the Beat generation ("Siddhartha" was

Contemplative, Modernist literature, Mythic, Self-reflection, Sincere, Spiritual

A perpetual innovator who indelibly altered the nature of his craft, French director Jean-Luc Godard stood at the forefront of the French New Wave, the late-1950s movement that included Fran'ois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and other former film critics from the journal Cahiers du Cinema who refracted the

Citational, Collage, Deconstructive, Existentialist literature, Expansive, French new wave, Intimate, Minimal, Open-ended, Quiet, Self-reflection, Social revolution