Imagine the short story as poetry. And imagine that Alice Munro isn't merely a writer -- she is a literary alchemist, stirring, distilling, testing, and violating the language and conventions of the short story with breathtaking results. As fellow short-story writer Lorrie Moore observed, "It's the s

Composed, Dense, Domestic, Elegant, Low realism

Dense, Dreamy, Modernist literature, Tragic, Witty

The popular media has adopted the name Lolita to describe any sexually precocious young woman with a penchant for twisting older men around her finger. The original Lolita, however, was a more mythical creature, a "nymphet" (Nabokov coined the word especially for her), who at a mere 12 years of age c

Charming, Dense, Elegant, Erotic, Lush, Post-war literature, Witty

Toni Morrison, arguably the most famous living African American author, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Ohio. As a child, she was an avid and precocious reader, and her family of masterful storytellers raised her on a steady diet of tales and legends. She studied literature at Howard and Co

African american fiction, Dense, Feminine, Layered, Melancholy, Pathos, Religious, Southern gothic, Spectral, Women's literature