Craig Raine has an extraterrestrial sensibility. His 1979 volume, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," established a new school of poetry -- for those who experience this world as if it were Mars. Writing from the unfamiliar perspective of a space alien living in modern England, Raine forces his reader

Clever, Dense, Distorted, Illusive, Postmodern poetry, Quirky

In 1925, while he was teaching at a boy's school in Wales, the young Evelyn Waugh attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. After getting fairly far from shore, he was forced to turn back: a shoal of stinging jellyfish had beset him. Macabre, comic, and ironic, this incident epitomizes Waugh's entire

Agitated, Angry, Clever, Realist fiction, Religious, Sardonic

In the introduction to her novel "Babel Tower," A.S. Byatt says that her intention was to write a book without metaphors. Apparently this proved a difficult feat: "The best I could do was a kind of regretful commentary on the impossibility of refraining from metaphor." Right. Byatt is a serious m

Clever, Composed, Contemplative, Eclectic, Playful, Postmodern fiction, Sophisticated

Tom Stoppard's intention is always to entertain, first and foremost. Though his plays are intellectually and philosophically rigorous, they're also good stories told with voluble wit. Sometimes he takes too easy a road to difficult issues in science and history, and for this he has been criticized by

Clever, Contemplative, Contemporary plays, Dense, Quirky, Sophisticated