Whether you find them aesthetically refreshing or merely overindulgent, the films of British avant-gardist Derek Jarman always present either visual or emotional surprises. A restlessly inventive film artist and painter, Jarman railed against the conventional stuffiness of what passed for art in his

Experimental, Homoerotic, Pioneering, Political, Psychological, Queer

To read William Burroughs is to discover a different world where people speak a different language -- a world you thought existed but never knew you thought existed. It is a place where borders are temporary, even viscous: bodies ooze and slime, semen flows freely, erections leap across the pages, an

Beats, Cartoonish, Cyberpunk fiction, Distorted, Experimental, Funny, Grotesque, Improvised, Perverse, Postmodern fiction, Profane, Psychedelic, Quirky, Surreal

According to Critic JoAnn Cannon, the key to Italo Calvino's renowned final novel, "Mr. Palomar" (1983), lies in several innovative literary ideas outlined in three essays written in the 1950s (and now included in the 1982 collection "Una pietra sopa"). These essays grappled with his contemporaries'

Clean, Eclectic, Experimental, Layered, Postmodern fiction, Spare, Surreal

"I salute Antonin Artaud," wrote Andre Breton, "for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." The French actor, director, poet, and theorist was an enraged man of arguable genius; nevertheless, his writings are seminal influences on experimental theater. Ar

Absurd, Experimental, Literature of transgression, Severe, Surreal, Surrealist theater, Theater of cruelty, Theater of the absurd