Taniguchi Buson, or Yosa Buson, was an influential painter and poet during the Edo period. Born in a suburb of Osaka, Japan, Buson was an orphan who eventually moved to Edo to study painting and haiku poetry in the tradition of Basho. He first gained notice for his visual art -- like much traditional
The arts at the beginning of twentieth century saw a turn from social realism to a more expressionistic pathos, and the work of Yasunari Kawabata (Kawabata Yasunari) was no exception. In the 1920s his association with the Neo-Sensualists says it all: these writers employed lyrical and impressionistic
Stockton, California, is generally known for producing seed hybrids, not literary ones. But that all changed in 1940, when the town saw the birth of author Maxine Hong Kingston. Stockton would remain the same, but Asian American literature would be changed forever.
Kingston was the third of eig
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