Murakami's fiction, often criticized for being "pop" literature by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time reflects an essential alienation, loneliness, and longing for love in a way that has touched readers in the US and Europe, as well as in East Asia. In addit

Fantastic, Fantasy, Pop, Surreal

Graphic novelist Charles Burns, known for is surreal and dark comics Black Hole and Big Baby, chronicles childhood trauma and teenage angst with a sleek visual style and brooding sensibility. His work is published by fantagraphics books and is among the most beautiful examples of the genre.

Dark, Graphic novels, Surreal

Arthur Rimbaud made his way through language like some crazed channeler of unseen forces. As a Symbolist poet, Rimbaud scrambled the senses and his prose, forging a synesthetic wash of words sustained by their own momentum and internal sense. There is no clear form (he did not write sonnets); there's

Anxiety, Dark, Dissonant, Overflowing, Pathos, Surreal, Symbolist poetry

Oscar Wilde pursued a life -- an art -- of pure uselessness. This was not because he objected to pragmatic pursuits, if kept in their proper place: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it inten

Aestheticist fiction, Clever, Mythic, Perverse, Surreal, Witty