Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philol…
Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor, and cultural innovator whose work has profoundly influenced the perception of comics as a legitimate art form, blending literary sophistication with e…
Daniel Clowes is an American cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator, and screenwriter whose work helped define the landscape of alternative comics and bring the medium into mainstream literary conv…
Mary Roach is a science author who specializes in the bizarre and offbeat; with a body of work ranging from deep-dives on the history of human cadavers to the science of the human anatomy during warfa…
Henry Charles Bukowski (born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski) was a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of hi…
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (often referred to as "the wise") was Emperor of the Roman Empire from 161 to his death in 180. He was the last of the "Five Good Emperors", and is also considered o…
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 …
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (Russian: Варлам Тихонович Шаламов; June 18, 1907–January 17, 1982), baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist and poet.
Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel …
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremos…
Yasuhiko Nishizawa was born in 1960 in Akashi, Japan. He studied Creative Writing in the United States, before returning to Japan and beginning to write murder mysteries while working as a university …
Hayley Campbell writes for GQ, WIRED, Empire and more. She lives in London, near a cemetery, with her cat, Ned. See more of her work at www.hayleycampbell.com
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the author of Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? as well as the New York Times best-selling books Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity. She is the creator of …
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano Frankivsk, Soviet Union. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers. She studied to b…
Megan Curran Rosenbloom is a librarian at UCLA Library in Los Angeles. Megan has a keen interest in the history of medicine and rare books. She was first President of the Southern California Society f…
Julian Sancton has written for Vanity Fair, Departures, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among other publications. He spent most of his childhood in France and attended Harvard University,…