From a small town in Sicily called (prophetically?) Chaos, there emerged one of the comic geniuses of modern European drama. Luigi Pirandello was always ahead of his time, scandalizing hoi polloi with ultra-Modernist experiments in structure, narrative, and staging. The grandfather of the absurd '- I
Todd Haynes' biography reads as if he were an unlikely mix between Cheech Marin, John F. Kennedy Jr., and Quentin Crisp. Haynes was born in Los Angeles and educated at Brown University, where he was awarded an honors degree in Art and Semiotics in 1985. He is also the first -- and possibly only -- ar
In the period that marked the end of Imperial Russia, Fyodor Dostoevsky was an ardent defender of the old Empire. Despite his undying devotion to Russian liberalism and his complete rejection of Western influences, Dostoevsky did not see his work as a platform for his own political diatribe. Unlik
Marcel Proust wrote one novel. It took a transformation from aristocrat to hermit, long nights in a cork-lined room (to drown out the bustling clamor of the Paris boulevards below), and more than ten years to write it. He called his opus, a tomb replete with half-page sentences and sinuous revelation