Franco Moretti is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic, whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He has written five books, Signs Taken for Wonders (19…
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); …
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983–2015, and for the apocalyptic come…
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Mar…
Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) was a prominent German philosopher, known for his work in intellectual history and phenomenology. He is best remembered for his development of "metaphorology," a method tha…
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and…
Mike Davis was a titan of radical scholarship, a "Marxist-Environmentalist" whose work redefined urban theory and California history. Born in Fontana and raised in the working-class community of Bosto…
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name of Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, is best known for his works Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), and Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment…
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and…
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Pari…
Fernand Paul Achille Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean (1923–49, then 1949–66), Civilization and Capi…
Ellen Meiksins Wood FRSC (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian and scholar. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University…
Perry Anderson is an English Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson…
Peter Burke is a British historian and professor. He was educated by the Jesuits and at St John's College, Oxford, and was a doctoral candidate at St Antony's College. From 1962 to 1979, he was part o…
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics col…
Giorgio Bassani was born in Bologna into a prosperous Jewish family of Ferrara, where he spent his childhood with his mother Dora, father Enrico (a doctor), brother Paolo, and sister Jenny. In 1934 he…
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told…
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Ma…
Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of …
Ayşegül Savaş grew up in London, Copenhagen, and Istanbul. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, among others. She lives in Paris.