Thomas Pynchon

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  Derrick Jensen

  Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. He has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.

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  John Zerzan

  American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author.
  
  His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of hunter gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like.
  
  Some subjects of his criticism include domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time.

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  Paul Virilio

  Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

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  Leonard Peltier

  Native American politicial activist imprissoned since 1977 accused of shooting two FBI officers.
  
  Peltier is considered to be a political prisoner by amnesty international and the European parlement.
  
  His parole has been denied by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

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  William Friedkin

  William Friedkin was an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director.

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  Herman Melville

  There is more than one author with this name
  
  Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
  Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a mer

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  Joe Meno

  Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, the Great Lakes Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Society of Midland Author's Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Story Prize, he is the author of seven novels and two short story collections. He is also the editor of Chicago Noir: The Classics. A long-time contributor to the seminal culture magazine, Punk Planet, his other non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times and Chicago magazine. He is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

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  James Crumley

  James Arthur Crumley was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as "one of modern crime writing's best practitioners", who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel"and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson.His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as "the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years."
  
  Crumley, who was born in Three Rivers, Texas, grew up in south Texas, where his father was an oil-field supervisor and his mother was a waitress.
  
  Crumley was a grade-A student and a football player, an offensive lineman, in high school. He attended the Georgia Institute of Te

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  Marshall McLuhan

  Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
  McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence

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  Luo Guanzhong

  Luo Ben (c. 1330–1400), better known by his style name Luo Guanzhong (罗贯中) (Mandarin pronunciation: [lwɔ kwantʂʊŋ]), was a Chinese writer who lived during the Yuan Dynasty. He was also known by his pseudonym Huhai Sanren (Chinese: 湖海散人; pinyin: Húhǎi Sǎnrén; literally "Leisure Man of Lakes and Seas"). Luo was attributed with writing Romance of the Three Kingdoms and editing Water Margin, two of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.

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  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Ada Louise (Landman) Huxtable (b. March 14, 1921, in New York, NY) is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished criticism." Her father, Michael Landman, was co-author (with his brother, Rabbi Isaac Landman) of the play "A Man of Honor."
  
  Ada Louise Landman received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941. In 1942, she married industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, and continued graduate study at New York University from 1942-50. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946-50. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950-63 before being named the

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  Adrian Pabst

  Adrian Pabst is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, and teaches political economy at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Lille (Sciences Po), France. He is the author of Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (2012).

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  Soetsu Yanagi

  Yanagi Sōetsu (柳 宗悦, March 21, 1889 - May 3, 1961), also known as Yanagi Muneyoshi, was a Japanese philosopher and founder of the mingei (folk craft) movement in Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s.

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  Robert Coover

  Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

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  George Herriman

  George Herriman was born August 2nd, 1880. He was an African-American cartoonist whose comic strip Krazy Kat has been said by many to be America’s greatest cartoon.
  
  Herriman was born in New Orleans, but his Creole family soon moved to California. As a teenager, he contributed drawings to local newspapers. In his early 20s, he moved to New York City and freelanced until newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst hired him for the New York Evening Journal. During the first decade of the 20th century, Herriman’s first success was called The Family Upstairs. Krazy Kat gained independence on October 28, 1913 as a cartoon character of his own, and ran until George Herriman died in 1944.
  
  Krazy Kat never achieved wide popularity among newspaper reader

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  Oakley Hall

  Oakley Hall also wrote under the nom de plume of O.M. Hall and Jason Manor.
  
  Oakley Maxwell Hall was an American novelist. He was born in San Diego, California, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and served in the Marines during World War II. Some of his mysteries were published under the pen names "O.M. Hall" and "Jason Manor." Hall received his Master of Fine Arts in English from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

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  Janet Malcolm

  Janet Malcolm was a journalist, biographer, collagist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of In the Freud Archives and The Crime of Sheila McGough , as well as biographies of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Anton Chekhov.
  
  The Modern Library chose her controversial book The Journalist and the Murderer — with its infamous first line — as one of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.
  
  Her most recent book is Forty-one False Starts .

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  John Hawkes

  John Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.
  Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
  Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.

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  Mel Y. Chen

  Mel Y. Chen is an academic whose scholarship intersects many fields, including queer theory, gender studies, animal studies, critical race theory, Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics.

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  Paul Williams

  Librarian note: There is more than one author on goodreads by this name.

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  Cormac McCarthy

  Cormac McCarthy was a highly acclaimed American novelist and screenwriter celebrated for his distinctive literary style, philosophical depth, and exploration of violence, morality, and the human condition. His writing, often characterized by sparse punctuation and lyrical, biblical language, delved into the primal forces that shape human behavior, set against the haunting landscapes of the American South and Southwest.
  McCarthy’s early novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, established him as a powerful voice in Southern Gothic literature, while Blood Meridian (1985) is frequently cited as his magnum opus—a brutal, visionary epic about violence and manifest destiny in the American West. In the 1990s, his "Border Trilogy"—All th

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  Nathanael West

  Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in Rhode Island, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn't graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.
  
  After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The

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  Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.
  
  He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II.
  
  After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing st

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  Hunter S. Thompson

  Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937-2005) was an American journalist and author, famous for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics and other mind-altering substances (and to a lesser extent, alcohol and firearms), his libertarian views, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority. He committed suicide in 2005.

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  Jack Kerouac

  Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
  
  Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and num

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  Charles Baudelaire

  Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later symbolist and modernist poets.
  
  Reputation of Charles Pierre Baudelaire rests primarily on perhaps the most important literary art collection, published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his early experiment Petits poèmes en prose (1868) ( Little Prose Poems ) most succeeded and innovated of the time.
  
  From financial disaster to prosecution for blasphemy, drama and strife filled life of known Baudelaire with highly controversial and often dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Long after his death, his name represents depravity and vice. He se

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  Patrick Moore

  Dr. Patrick Moore is a lifelong independent scientist and environmentalist. He was a co-founder of Greenpeace in 1971, a director for 15 years, and a leader of many campaigns, including ending nuclear weapons testing, saving the whales, and ending toxic dumping. In the mid-1980s he became disenchanted with the positions his fellow Greenpeace directors were adopting, using misinformation, sensation, and fear for fundraising, instead of using valid science. He struck out on his own, determined to be a sensible environmentalist, basing policies on sound science, and balancing environmental, social, and economic priorities. He is a humanitarian environmentalist who believes people are not the enemy of the environment but rather an integral part

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  Charlie Huston

  Charlie Huston is an American novelist, screenwriter, and comic book writer known for his genre-blending storytelling and character-driven narratives. His twelve novels span crime, horror, and science fiction, and have been published by Ballantine, Del Rey, Mulholland, and Orion, with translations in nine languages. He is the creator of the Henry Thompson trilogy, beginning with Caught Stealing, which was announced in 2024 as a forthcoming film adaptation directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Austin Butler. Huston’s stand-alone novels include The Shotgun Rule, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, Sleepless, and Skinner. He also authored the vampire noir series Joe Pitt Casebooks while living in Manhattan and later California

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  Vladimir Nabokov

  Russian: Владимир Набоков .
  
  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery, and had a big interest in chess problems.
  
  Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.
  
  Lolita was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed ei

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  Thomas Piketty

  Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔma pikɛti]; born May 7, 1971) is a French economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is the director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and professor at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of the best selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasizes the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a global tax on wealth.
  
  Piketty was bor

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  Garielle Lutz

  Garielle Lutz is an American writer of both poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Sleepingfish, NOON, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, StoryQuarterly, The Believer, Cimarron Review, 3rd Bed, Slate Magazine, New York Tyrant, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Apocalypse Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press), PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books), The Random House Treasury of Light Verse and in the film 60 Writers/60 Places.
  
  A collection of her short fiction, Stories in the Worst Way, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 1996 and re-published by 3rd Bed in 2002 and Calamari Press in 2009. Lutz's second collection of short stories, I Looked Alive, was published by the now-defunct Four Walls Eight Windows in

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  M.J. Hyland

  M.J. Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and law at the University of Melbourne, Australia and worked as a lawyer for several years. Her first novel, How the Light Gets In (2003) was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Age Book of the Year and also took third place in the Barnes & Noble, Discover Great New Writers Award. How the Light Gets In was also joint winner of the Best Young Australian Novelist Award.
  
  Carry Me Down (2006), her second novel, was winner of both the Encore Prize (2007) and the Hawthornden Prize (2007) and was also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize (2006). Hyland lives in Manchester, England, where she teaches in the Centr

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  Chloe Aridjis

  Chloe Aridjis was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. After receiving a BA from Harvard, she went on to receive a PhD from Oxford University. A collection of essays on Magic and Poetry in Nineteenth-century France was released in 2005. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, followed in 2009, winning the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France.

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  Julián Ríos

  Julián Ríos (born Vigo, Galicia, 1941) is a Spanish writer, most frequently classified as a postmodernist, whom Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has called "the most inventive and creative" of Spanish-language writers. His first two books were written à deux with Octavio Paz.
  
  His best known work, experimental and heavily influenced by the verbal inventiveness of James Joyce, was published in 1983 under the title Larva.
  
  Julián Ríos currently lives and works in France, on the outskirts of Paris

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  Jean-Patrick Manchette

  Jean-Patrick Manchette was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of the 1970s - 1980s . His stories are violent, existentialist explorations of the human condition and French society.
  
  Manchette was politically to the left and his writing reflects this through his analysis of social positions and culture. His books are reminiscent of the nouvelle vague crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville, employing a similarly cool, existential style on a typically American genre (film noir for Melville and pulp novels for Manchette).
  
  Three of his novels have been translated into English.

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  Greil Marcus

  Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York. He lives in Oakland, California.

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  William T. Vollmann

  William Tanner Vollmann is an American author, journalist, and essayist known for his ambitious and often unconventional literary works. Born on July 28, 1959, in Los Angeles, California, Vollmann has earned a reputation as one of the most prolific and daring writers of his generation.
  
  Vollmann's early life was marked by tragedy; his sister drowned when he was a child, an event that profoundly impacted him and influenced his writing. He attended Deep Springs College, a small, isolated liberal arts college in California, before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature. After college, Vollmann spent some time in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, an experience that would later inform some of his works.
  
  His

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  Michael Hudson

  Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. He is a contributor to The Hudson Report, a weekly economic and financial news podcast produced by Left Out.

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  William S. Burroughs

  William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
  A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
  His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
  Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearance

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  Michael Mann

  Michael Kenneth Mann is an American film director, screenwriter, author, and producer, best known for his stylized crime dramas. Mann has received numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. His most acclaimed works include the films Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), and Public Enemies (2009). He is also known for his role as executive producer on the popular TV series Miami Vice (1984–89), which he adapted into a 2006 feature film.

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  Charles Portis

  Charles McColl Portis was an American author best known for his novels Norwood (1966) and the classic Western True Grit (1968), both adapted as films. The latter also inspired a film sequel and a made-for-TV movie sequel. A newer film adaptation of True Grit was released in 2010.
  
  Portis served in the Marine Corps during the Korean war and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He graduated with a degree in journalism in 1958.
  
  His journalistic career included work at the Arkansas Gazette before he moved to New York to work for The New York Herald Tribune. After serving as the London bureau chief for the The New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism in 1964 and returned to Arkansas to write novels.
  
  

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  David Mitchell

  David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children. In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote: "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but wo

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  George Saunders

  George Saunders was born December 2, 1958 and raised on the south side of Chicago. In 1981 he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He worked at Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, NY as a technical writer and geophysical engineer from 1989 to 1996. He has also worked in Sumatra on an oil exploration geophysics crew, as a doorman in Beverly Hills, a roofer in Chicago, a convenience store clerk, a guitarist in a Texas country-and-western band, and a knuckle-puller in a West Texas slaughterhouse.
  
  After reading in People magazine about the Master's program at Syracuse University, he applied. Mr. Saunders received an MA with an emphasis in creative writing

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  Jonathan Franzen

  Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
  Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club sele

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  David McGowan

  Librarian note:
  There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

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  Nick Bryant

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name on GR

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  Robert Farris Thompson

  Robert Farris Thompson is a professor of the Art History at Yale University. He specializes in African and African-American art.

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  J.G. Ballard

  James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually arous

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  David Lynch

  David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. He received acclaim for his films, which are often distinguished by their surrealist, dreamlike qualities. In a career spanning more than fifty years, he was awarded numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and an Honorary Academy Award in 2019. Described as a "visionary", Lynch was considered one of the most important filmmakers of his era.
  Lynch studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film was the independent surrealist film Eraserhead (1977), which saw success as a midnight movie. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director fo

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  Marlon James

  Marlon James is a Jamaican-born writer. He has published three novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009) and A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Now living in Minneapolis, James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
  
  James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police: his mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective and his father (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) a lawyer. James is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature. He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes Unive

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  Fredric Jameson

  Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

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  Mark J. Plotkin

  Mark J. Plotkin is an ethnobotanist.

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  Luigi Russolo

  Luigi Russolo — painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement — was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music.

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  David Toop

  David Toop is a musician, writer, and Professor of Audio Culture and Improvisation at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is the author of Ocean of Sound, Sinister Resonance, Into the Maelstrom, and other books.

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  Yoel Hoffmann

  Yoel Hoffmann (23 June 1937– 25 August 2023) was an Israeli Jewish contemporary author, editor, scholar and translator.

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  Jacques Attali

  Jacques Attali is a French economist and scholar. From 1981 to 1991, he was an advisor to President François Mitterrand. He subsequently cast doubt on Mitterrand's past as a mid-level Vichy government functionary in his retrospective of Mitterrand's career, C'était François Mitterrand, published in 2005.
  
  In April 1991 he became the first President of the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the financial institution established by western governments to assist the countries of eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union in their transition to democratic market economies. He worked at the bank until 1993.
  
  In 1998 Attali founded the French non-profit organization PlaNet Finance which focuses on microfinance.

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  Alfred Döblin

  Bruno Alfred Döblin (August 10, 1878 – June 26, 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politics, religion, art, and society; and numerous letters — his complete works, republished by Deutscher Taschenbuch

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  Robert Walser

  Robert Walser, a German-Swiss prose writer and novelist, enjoyed high repute among a select group of authors and critics in Berlin early in his career, only to become nearly forgotten by the time he committed himself to the Waldau mental clinic in Bern in January 1929. Since his death in 1956, however, Walser has been recognized as German Switzerland's leading author of the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps Switzerland's single significant modernist. In his homeland he has served as an emboldening exemplar and a national classic during the unparalleled expansion of German-Swiss literature of the last two generations.
  
  Walser's writing is characterized by its linguistic sophistication and animation. His work exhibits several sets of

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  Brian Eno

  Brian Peter George Eno, also mononymously known as Eno, is an English musician, songwriter, record producer and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering contributions to ambient music and electronica, and for producing, recording, and writing works in rock and pop music. A self-described "non-musician", Eno has helped introduce unconventional concepts and approaches to contemporary music. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures. In 2019, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Roxy Music.

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  Adam Levin

  Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, was published in late 2010. His stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Esquire. Winner of the 2003 Tin House/Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, Levin holds an MA in Clinical Social Work from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. His collection of short stories, Hot Pink, was published by McSweeney’s in 2011. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing at Columbia College and The School of the Art Institute.
  
  Authorial Influences and Inspirations: Adam Novy, George Saunders, Leslie Lockett, Stanley Elkin, Christian TeBordo, Rebecca Curtis, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Salvador Pla

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  Christoph Cox

  Christoph Cox, professor of philosophy, received his B.A. in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University and a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Cox teaches and writes on contemporary European philosophy, cultural theory, and aesthetics.

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  Joscelyn Godwin

  Composer, musicologist and translator, known for his work on ancient music, paganism and music in the occult.
  
  

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  Matthew McBride

  Matthew McBride is a former assembly-line worker living in rural Missouri. In his words, “These people are the people I know and see every day, and this is the world I know.” He is also the author of the cult hit Frank Sinatra in a Blender.

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  David R. Palmer

  David R. Palmer is an American science fiction author. His works have been nominated three times for Hugo Awards.

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  Raymond Carver

  Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958. He saw this opportunity as a turning point.
  
  Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detai

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  Sidney Lumet

  Sidney Lumet was an Academy Award-winning American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982), all of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director. He won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, for his "brilliant services to screenwriters, performers, and the art of the motion picture".

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  Val Wilmer

  Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941) is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture.

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  Genichiro Takahashi

  Takahashi was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima prefecture and attended the Economics Department of Yokohama National University without graduating. As a radical student, he was arrested and spent half a year in prison, which caused Takahashi to develop a form of aphasia. As part of his rehabilitation, his doctors encouraged him to start writing. Since April 2005, he has been a professor at the International Department of Meiji Gakuin University. Takahashi's current wife, Tanikawa Naoko and former wife Murai Yuzuki were also both writers.
  
  Takahashi's first novel, Sayonara, Gyangutachi (Sayonara, Gangsters), was published in 1982, and won the Gunzo Literary Award for First Novels. It has been acclaimed by Critics as one of the most important works

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  Epeli Hauʻofa

  Hauʻofa was born of Tongan missionary parents working in Papua New Guinea. At his death, he was a citizen of Fiji, living in Suva. He attended school in Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Fiji (Lelean Memorial School), and later attended the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales; McGill University, Montreal; and the Australian National University, Canberra, where he gained a Ph.D. in social anthropology. Hauʻofa published in 1981 with the title Mekeo: inequality and ambivalence in a village society. Hauʻofa taught briefly at the University of Papua New Guinea, and was a research fellow at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva, Fiji. From 1978 to 1981 he was the Deputy Private Secretary to His Majesty King Tāufaʻāhau Tup

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  Carlos Fuentes

  Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican writer and one of the best-known novelists and essayists of the 20th century in the Spanish-speaking world. Fuentes influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages.
  
  Fuentes was born in Panama City, Panama; his parents were Mexican. Due to his father being a diplomat, during his childhood he lived in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. In his adolescence, he returned to Mexico, where he lived until 1965. He was married to film star Rita Macedo from 1959 till 1973, although he was an habitual philanderer and allegedly, his affairs - which he claimed include film actresses such as Jeanne Moreau and Je

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  Richard Brautigan

  Richard Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short-story writer. Born in Tacoma, Washington, he moved to San Francisco in the 1950s and began publishing poetry in 1957. He started writing novels in 1961 and is probably best known for his early work Trout Fishing in America. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1984.

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  Danielle Chelosky

  Danielle Chelosky is a writer and journalist from New York. She works at Stereogum and has bylines in NPR, The Fader, and Billboard. She is an editor at Hobart and an editorial assistant at Amphetamine Sulphate. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2022 and was awarded the Lori Hertzberg Prize for Creativity. She is the author of PREGAMING GRIEF and BABY BRUISE.

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  Wilson Harris

  Born in Guyana in 1921 and based in England since 1959, Wilson Harris is one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century. His writings, which include poems, numerous essays and twenty-four novels, provide a passionate and unique defense of the notion of cross-culturalism as well as a visionary exploration of the interdependence between history, landscape and humanity. In 2010 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature.

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  Derek Bailey

  Derek Bailey was an English avant-garde guitarist and an important figure in the free improvisation movement. Bailey abandoned conventional performance techniques found in jazz, exploring atonality, noise, and whatever unusual sounds he could produce with the guitar. Much of his work was released on his own label Incus Records. In addition to solo work, Bailey collaborated frequently with other musicians and recorded with collectives such as Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Company.

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  E.H. Gombrich

  Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE (30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian, who spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.
  
  

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  Howard Jacobson

  Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Cambridge. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Who’s Sorry Now? and Kalooki Nights (both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and, most recently, The Act of Love. Jacobson is also a respected critic and broadcaster, and writes a weekly column for the Independent. He lives in London.
  
  Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.
  
  “The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of

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  Jean-Luc Nancy

  Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).

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  David Markson

  David Markson was an American novelist, born David Merrill Markson in Albany, New York. He is the author of several postmodern novels, including This is Not a Novel, Springer's Progress, and Wittgenstein's Mistress. His most recent work, The Last Novel, was published in 2007 and received a positive review in the New York Times, which called it "a real tour de force."
  
  Markson's work is characterized by an unconventional approach to narration and plot. While his early works may draw on the modernist tradition of William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, Markson says his later novels are "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage."
  
  Dalkey Archive Press has published several of hi

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  Richard Slotkin

  Richard Slotkin is an American cultural critic, historian, and novelist. He is Olin Professor of English and American Studies Emeritus at Wesleyan University, where he was instrumental in establishing the American Studies and Film Studies programs. His work explores the mythology of the American frontier and its influence on national identity. His trilogy—Regeneration Through Violence, Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation—is widely regarded as a seminal analysis of the frontier myth in American culture. Slotkin has also written historical novels, including Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln and The Crater: A Novel of the Civil War. His contributions to scholarship and literature have earned him numerous accolades, including the Albert J.

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  William Deresiewicz

  William Deresiewicz was an associate professor of English at Yale University until 2008 and is a widely published book critic. His reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Bookforum, and The American Scholar. He was nominated for National Magazine awards in 2008 and 2009 and the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2010.
  
  Wlliam Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent college speaker, and the best-selling author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. He taught English at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer in 2008.
  
  

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  Saneh Sangsuk

  Saneh Sangsuk is an award-winning Thai author who wrote White Shadow (2001) and the short story Venom (2001). In 2008, he received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) Medal from the French Ministry of Culture for his remarkable contributions to literature. His works have been translated into seven different languages including English, German, French and Spanish. His book White Shadow is considered one of the best 20 novels in Thailand. Currently, he lives in Phetchaburi, Thailand, and uses the pen name Dan-arun Saengthong in his published work.
  
  His pen name in the original language is แดนอรัญ แสงทอง

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  Julian of Norwich

  Julian of Norwich was the most important English mystic of the 14th century. Her spirituality is strongly Trinitarian and basically Neoplatonic.
  
  In her Revelations of Divine Love Julian relates that in May 1373, when she was 30 years old, she suffered a serious illness. After she had been administered extreme unction, she received 16 revelations within the span of a few hours. When she wrote her Revelations, she was a recluse at Norwich, supported by the Benedictine convent of Carrow. Anchorite seclusion was a rather common form of life in 14th-century England among Christians with high spiritual aspirations. A woman of little formal education - she calls herself "unlettered" - Julian writes in a beautifully simple style and shows a solid gr

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  Dario Argento

  Dario Argento is an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for his work in the horror film genre, particularly in the subgenre known as giallo, and for his influence on modern horror and slasher movies. Argento and former partner Daria Nicolodi are the parents of actress Asia Argento.

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  Harmony Korine

  Best known both as the writer of films "Kids" (1995) and "Ken Park" (2002) and as the director of films "Gummo" (1997), "julien donkey-boy" (1999), and "Mister Lonely" (2007), Harmony Korine has been deemed as the "enfant terrible" of modern independent dramatic film. Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of PBS cinematographer Sol Korine spent many of his days at revival theaters, drawing vast inspiration from a wide variety of envelop-pushing filmmakers. After reaching a break-through opportunity as a screenwriter for Larry Clark's first highly controversial film "Kids" in 1995, Korine quickly became viewed as one of America's most bizarre and inventive creative entities, especially with the release of his directorial debut "Gummo" in 1

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  Vincent Crapanzano

  Vincent Crapanzano (Dist Prof, Anthropology and Comparative Literature, City University of New York) graduated from the Ecole Internationale in Geneva, received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard, and his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Paris, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Cape Town. He has lectured in major universities in North and South America, Europe, Hong Kong, and South Africa.

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  John Barth

  John Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and composed The Shirt of Nessus , a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952.
  He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
  The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions,

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  Michael Cisco

  Michael Cisco is an American weird fiction writer, Deleuzian academic and a teacher, currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999.
  
  He is interested in confusion.

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  Abbie Hoffman

  Abbott Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a social and political activist in the United States who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies"). Later he became a fugitive from the law, who lived under an alias following a conviction for dealing cocaine.
  
  Hoffman was arrested and tried for conspiracy and inciting to riot as a result of his role in protests that led to violent confrontations with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, along with Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Seale. The group was known collectively as the "Chicago Eight"; when Seale's prosecution was separated from the others, they became known as the Chicago Seven.
  
  Hoffman came to prominence in the 196

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  Charles Rosen

  Charles Rosen was a concert pianist, Professor of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the author of numerous books, including The Classical Style, The Romantic Generation, and Freedom and the Arts.

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  David Foster Wallace

  David Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely regarded as one of the most innovative literary voices of his generation, Wallace is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
  Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. H

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  Mark Z. Danielewski

  Mark Z. Danielewski is an American author best known for his books House of Leaves, Only Revolutions, The Fifty Year Sword, The Little Blue Kite, and The Familiar series.
  
  Danielewski studied English Literature at Yale. He then decided to move to Berkeley, California, where he took a summer program in Latin at the University of California, Berkeley. He also spent time in Paris, preoccupied mostly with writing.
  
  In the early 1990s, he pursued graduate studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He later served as an assistant editor and worked on sound for Derrida, a documentary based on the life of the Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida.
  
  His second novel, Only Revolutions, was released in 2006. The novel wa

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  Donald Barthelme

  Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) apparently collects sometimes surrealistic stories of modern life of American writer Donald Barthelme.
  
  A student at the University of Pennsylvania bore Donald Barthelme. Two years later, in 1933, the family moved to Texas, where father of Barthelme served as a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later majored in journalism.
  
  In 1951, this still student composed his first articles for the Houston Post. The Army drafted Barthelme, who arrived in Korea on 27 July 1953, the very day, when parties signed the ceasefire, ending the war. He served briefly as the editor of a newspaper of Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post. Once

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  David Berman

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
  
  David Berman was born in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1967. He graduated from the Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, the University of Virginia, and the University of Massachusetts. His band, the Silver Jews, has released four albums, The Natural Bridge, Starlite Walker, American Water, and Bright Flight, on Drag City Records (www.dragcity.com). He resides in Nashville, Tennessee.
  
  Photo credit: Bernd Bodtländer
  
  

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  Michio Takeyama

  Michio Takeyama (竹山 道雄, Takeyama Michio, 17 July 1903 – 15 June 1984) was a Japanese writer, literary critic and scholar of German literature, active in Shōwa period Japan.
  
  After World War II, Takeyama became famous for his novel, Biruma no Tategoto (Harp of Burma), which was serialized in Akatonbo (The Red Dragonfly), a literary magazine aimed primarily at children, over 1947–1948, before being published in book format in October 1948. An award-winning novel, it was subsequently translated into English under UNESCO sponsorship, and made into a 1956 movie, The Burmese Harp. In 1948, he wrote Scars, set in northern China, which Takeyama had visited in 1931 and 1938.

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  Jack Black

  John Black was a late 19th century/early 20th century hobo and professional burglar, living out the dying age of the Wild West. He wrote You Can't Win (Macmillan, 1926) a memoir or sketched autobiography describing his days on the road and life as an outlaw. Black's book was written as an anti-crime book urging criminals to go straight but is also his statement of belief in the futility of prisons and the criminal justice system, hence the title of the book. Jack Black was writing from experience, having spent thirty years (fifteen of which were spent in various prisons) as a traveling criminal and offers tales of being a cross-country stick-up man, home burglar, petty thief, and opium fiend.
  
  Jack Black is an essentially anonymous figure (ev

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  Akira Kurosawa

  Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), and Ran (1985), set in feudal Japan of director Akira Kurosawa, greatly influenced American and European filmmaking.
  
  This producer, screenwriter, and editor, regarded of the most important and influential in the history of cinema, directed thirty in a career, spanning 57 years.
  
  Following a brief stint as a painter, Kurosawa entered the industry in 1936. After years of working as an assistant and scriptwriter, he made his debut in 1943 during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata, also known as Judo Saga. After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented the reputation of t

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  Paul Thomas Anderson

  Paul Thomas Anderson is a five-time Academy Award-nominated American filmmaker.

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  James M. Cain

  James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892–October 27, 1977) was an American journalist and novelist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hard-boiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the "roman noir."
  
  He was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a prominent educator and an opera singer. He inherited his love for music from his mother, but his high hopes of starting a career as a singer himself were thwarted when she told him that his voice was not good enough.
  
  After graduating from Washington College where his father, James W. Cain served as president, in 1910, he began working as a journalist for The Baltimore Sun.
  
  He was drafted into th

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  James Ellroy

  Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).
  
  

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  Nick Robins

  Nick Robins is a geologist by profession, is acknowledged for setting maritime history within the bigger social and political picture.

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