It's rare that a biographer has a life more interesting than his own subjects, but Lytton Strachey was a biography waiting to happen. The eleventh child of an Indian civil engineer and the essayist Lady Jane Strachey, Lytton went from being a proper history student at Cambridge to living life as a de

Bloomsbury, Clever, Excessive, Glamour, Perverse, Profane

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

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

Marcel Proust wrote one novel. It took a transformation from aristocrat to hermit, long nights in a cork-lined room (to drown out the bustling clamor of the Paris boulevards below), and more than ten years to write it. He called his opus, a tomb replete with half-page sentences and sinuous revelation

Aestheticist fiction, Anxiety, Excessive, Layered, Modernist literature, Neurotic, Overflowing, Perverse, Sensual