Five months after "The God of Small Things" hit the stands, Arundhati Roy took the stage and accepted Britain's most prestigious literary honor, the Booker Prize. This was a day of multiple firsts: not only was Roy the first non-expatriate Indian author to take home the award, she also was the first

Lush, Playful, Polychromatic, Post-colonial literature, Sensual

The popular media has adopted the name Lolita to describe any sexually precocious young woman with a penchant for twisting older men around her finger. The original Lolita, however, was a more mythical creature, a "nymphet" (Nabokov coined the word especially for her), who at a mere 12 years of age c

Charming, Dense, Elegant, Erotic, Lush, Post-war literature, Witty

Viewing the human condition as a "confused impurity," Pablo Neruda wrote what he called "impure poetry." His childhood in remote Temuco, Chile, was spent voraciously reading Spanish and French literature. The boy "hunted poems" in the mountains and forests nearby, and published several pieces in Te

Dreamy, Ecstatic, Erotic, Intimate, Lush, Political, Rebel, Romantic poetry, Saturated, Surrealist poetry

"I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk." This dark inspiration led Umberto Eco to begin his career as novelist at the somewhat tardy age of 46. Already established as one of the world's leading semioticians, a lecturer in constant demand, and a thin

Dense, Layered, Lush, Mathematical, Postmodern fiction, Semiotics