Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their rele
In the period that marked the end of Imperial Russia, Fyodor Dostoevsky was an ardent defender of the old Empire. Despite his undying devotion to Russian liberalism and his complete rejection of Western influences, Dostoevsky did not see his work as a platform for his own political diatribe. Unlik
The poet Karl Shapiro, in his introduction to the 1961 American publication of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," said, "Morally I regard Miller as a holy man'Gandhi with a penis."
This was Miller's first book, and its pages were rife with full, frontal descriptions of sexual joy and despair. He ha