Growing up white, Jewish, and homosexual in the turbulent South of the '60s does not lay the groundwork for a complacent life. Finding himself a one-man experiment in the limits of tolerance, Kushner has used theater to explore issues of prejudice and community. His plays shed special light on the po

Contemporary plays, Epic, Ethereal, Expansive, Funny, Gay/lesbian theater, Political, Queer, Sprawling

Unfortunately, little is known about the personal life of Thomas Pynchon, the man behind such innovative texts as "The Crying of Lot 49" (1966) and "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973). Carefully guarding his privacy ever since the 1961 publication of his first novel, "V.," Pynchon has nevertheless dazzled cri

Deconstructive, Excessive, Funny, Manic, Open-ended, Paranoid, Post-war literature, Postmodern fiction, Surreal, Trippy

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

A historian of the Swirling Surface, Foucault was not really a philosopher -- in fact, he completely rejected the concept of philosophy. His work is historiographic; he wrote histories of madness, of the medical clinic, of the modern prison, of sexuality. Yet, at the risk of angering his ghost, we mu

Cultural studies/new historicism, Deconstructive, Event, Flux, Funny, Homoerotic, Political, Poststructuralism, Power