Eons before "Days of Our Lives" reared its ugly head on television, Tolstoy was a master of the soap opera. His serialized surveys of nineteenth-century Russian society are devoted to detailing in relentlessly romantic prose the epiphanies of love and war, the travails of the individual on the battle

Dramatic, Epic, High realism, Huge, Monumental

Anxiety, Catastrophe, Ecstatic, Epic, Existentialist literature, High realism, Joyful, Manic, Psychological

Reality is a little less rigid in the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Blurring the lines between belief and possibility, Garcia Marquez uses Magical Realism -- which presupposes the existence of a kind of supernatural order of things -- and a mythological style of storytelling to celebrate the inc

Elegant, Epic, Erotic, Fantastic, Magical realism, Polychromatic, Repetition, Surreal

When, in his famous epic poem "Howl," Allen Ginsberg spoke of "the best minds of my generation," he could only have meant the Beats, that band of notorious writers and artists that formed his surrogate family. Ginsberg, the anti-establishment Buddhist homosexual, became themost widely known public pe

Beat poetry, Epic, Homoerotic, Pathos, Perverse, Political, Queer literature, Religious, Romantic poetry, Sincere, Trippy