When Naguib Mahfouz serialized his novel 'The Children of Gebelawi' in Arab-language newspapers, the fundamentalist Muslim group al-Jihad promptly put a bounty on his head. Thirty years later, in 1994, the Nobel Prize-winner was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home. Though he lived to tell the

Dramatic, Epic, Intense, Modernist literature, Mythic

"The air raids on the distant metropolis, which I watched from the shelter at the arsenal, were beautiful. The flames seemed to hue to all the colors in the rainbow: it was like watching the light of a distant bonfire at a great banquet of extravagant death and destruction." So wrote Yukio Mishima in

Dramatic, Enigmatic, Homoerotic, Intense, Post-war literature

It might seem as if she lived an entire lifetime during the writing of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." Her voice is that of a wizened old woman with boundless patience and an endless amount of time to observe the smallest sublime moments in nature. But in fact, Annie Dillard wrote the book while she was s

Clever, Contemplative, Elegant, Intense, Literary fiction, Witty

When Jacques Lacan announced a "return to Freud" in the early 1950s, Sartre and Camus shuddered with existential angst inside the fortress they had built around the rational mind. Indeed, the emergence of Lacan, with his emphasis on unconscious desires, spelled the downfall of Existentialism, the phi

Clever, Death, Intense, Perverse, Phallic, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Sublime