For most of the twentieth century, even as Latin American writers began to achieve world renown for their cutting-edge work, Brazil found itself without a laureate. That is, until Clarice Lispector joined the fray. Born in the Ukraine, Lispector was raised in northeastern Brazil, where she was expose
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
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
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'