"Faggot-Retard" was Todd Solondz's initial title of choice for his second feature film. He opted instead for the less inflammatory "Welcome to the Dollhouse," which fortunately did nothing to dilute the tenderly misanthropic cult classic about a pubescent protagonist taunted by the alternating appell

Dark, Depressive, Domestic, Neurotic

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

In July of 1883, an average middle-class Jewish family in an average suburb of Prague (then in Austria) ushered into the average world a new creature: Franz Kafka. He would never forgive them for this unnatural act of torture. Franz kept his neurosis quietly to himself throughout his childhood, r

Absurd, Anxiety, Dreamy, Dystopic, Existentialist literature, Hallucinatory, Hypnotic, Intense, Modernist literature, Neurotic, Profane

Spalding Gray splashed into the national consciousness with the epic monologue-cum-performance piece "Swimming to Cambodia" (1985), a distinctive solo show that has been on the road in some incarnation for well-nigh 20 years. He cut his teeth on Postmodern performance theory with SoHo's experimental

Agitated, Epic, Neurotic, Solo performance