Junichiro Tanizaki wrote erotically and ironically about the dynamics of Japanese culture and the effect of Western influences on tradition. In a style that is delicate and emotionally powerful, Tanizaki's narratives progress through dialogue and careful description without an omniscience narrator. T

Clean, Erotic, Intense, Ironic, Modernist literature, Perverse

"I'm the new Berlin Wall. Try to tear me down." -- Hedwig An East German war bride looks after a young boy in a Kansas trailer park. She is an ex-prostitute who turns her young charge on to Barry Manilow. The story seems lifted from a tabloid, but these are actual childhood memories for one unusual

Angry, New american musical, Perverse, Pop, Tragic

Oscar Wilde pursued a life -- an art -- of pure uselessness. This was not because he objected to pragmatic pursuits, if kept in their proper place: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it inten

Aestheticist fiction, Clever, Mythic, Perverse, Surreal, Witty

When Jacques Lacan announced a "return to Freud" in the early 1950s, Sartre and Camus shuddered with existential angst inside the fortress they had built around the rational mind. Indeed, the emergence of Lacan, with his emphasis on unconscious desires, spelled the downfall of Existentialism, the phi

Clever, Death, Intense, Perverse, Phallic, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Sublime