Gus Van Sant is an American filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work has long explored the edges of American life, with a particular sensitivity to characters who exist outside the cultural m…
Bill Bryson is a bestselling American-British author known for his witty and accessible nonfiction books spanning travel, science, and language. He rose to prominence with Notes from a Small Island (1…
Edith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Dra…
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.
BRET EASTON ELLIS is the author of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms. His works have been translated into twenty-sev…
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spe…
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical t…
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 …
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received…
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…
Jean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His work, muc…
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…
From 1968-1974 he studied medieval and modern history in Munich and Aix-en-Provence. In the '80s he worked as a screenwriter, for Kir Royal and Monaco Franze among others.
Scott Heim was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1966. He grew up in a small farming community there, and later attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence, earning a B.A. in English and Art History in …
Miranda July (born February 15, 1974) is a performance artist, musician, writer, actress and film director. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California, after having lived for many years in Portl…
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she w…
Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class differenc…
PATTI SMITH is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has…
Herman Koch (1953) is known as a television producer and a writer. The book 'Het diner', published in 2009, was his breakthrough in the Netherlands. It was published in 17 countries. It was partly bas…
André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust…
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 Generatio…
French-Rwandan Gaël Faye is an author, composer and hip hop artist. He was born in 1982 in Burundi, and has a Rwandan mother and French father. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the Rwa…
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 Pr…