Fairy tales, Gothic fiction, a baroque sensibility, feminism, gender bending, and science fiction: from this mélange emerges Angela Carter's fiction. A phantasmagoric opus that wavers between the horrific, the erotic, and the humorous, Carter's work is a series of appropriations and transformation

Fantastic, Fantasy, Feminist, Lyrical, Mythic, Postmodern fiction, Women's literature

"Every writer is, in the long run, on his own, but it helps, in the most practical way to have a tradition. The English language was mine; the [English] tradition was not." Born and raised in Trinidad to a family of Indian Brahmin origin, writer V. S. Naipaul manipulates his rootlessness into an ab

Dystopic, Mythic, Open-ended, Political, Post-colonial literature

When Naguib Mahfouz serialized his novel 'The Children of Gebelawi' in Arab-language newspapers, the fundamentalist Muslim group al-Jihad promptly put a bounty on his head. Thirty years later, in 1994, the Nobel Prize-winner was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home. Though he lived to tell the

Dramatic, Epic, Intense, Modernist literature, Mythic

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