Edgar Wind was a German-born British interdisciplinary art historian, specializing in iconology in the Renaissance era. He was a member of the school of art historians associated with Aby Warburg and …
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known…
Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horatius, with whom he…
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); …
Frank Wedekind was a German dramatist whose bold, unconventional plays reshaped modern theatre by challenging social norms and exposing the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality, especially around sexuali…
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born …
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) was a Japanese author, and one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki.
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional d…
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 sym…
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 c…
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, commonly known as Suetonius (ca. 69/75 - after 130), was a Roman historian belonging to the equestrian order in the early Imperial era. His most important surviving work i…
French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He reje…
French surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud advocated a deliberately shocking and confrontational style of drama that he called "theater of cruelty."
Erwin Panofsky was a German art historian, whose academic career was pursued almost entirely in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. In 1935, while teaching concurrently at New York University …
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 an…
Italian poet, novelist, critic, essayst, journalist, translator, dramatist, film director, screenwriter and philosopher, often regarded as one of the greatest minds of XX century, was murdered violent…
A prolific medievalist of international renown, Le Goff is sometimes considered the principal heir and continuator of the movement known as Annales School (École des Annales), founded by his intellect…
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…
Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017) was a co-founder of Zero Books and Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical writing for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life an…
Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won t…
José de Sousa Saramago (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese novelist and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony…
Sándor Márai (originally Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmied de Mára) was a Hungarian writer and journalist. He was born in the city of Kassa in Austria-Hungary (now Košice in Slovakia) to an old family o…
Victor I. Stoichiță is a Professor of the History of Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of "A Short History of the Shadow" (Reaktion, 1997) and co-author of "Goya" (Reakt…
Ioan Petru Culianu was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer. He served as professor of the history of religions at the U…
