By: Lucy Sante

Jules Verne on laudanum, and four other writers rolled into one.

By: Amanda French

Interested in all manner of things, from cancer to clementines.

By: Franklin Bruno

High modernist experi­ments ex­ecuted at pulp­smith rates.

By: Tim Carmody

The funniest man in Paris — why were his novels so serious?

By: Peggy Nelson

He insisted that he was a poet, no matter what the medium.

By: Tom Nealon

Food requires no justification, no retreat to the cerebral.

By: Alix Lambert

“I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows.”

By: Amanda French

What linked her lowbrow mysteries and highbrow scholarship?

By: Brian Berger

“Coarse sexuality. Data and cynical commentary… Jokes!”

By: Brian Berger

His albums demonstrated traditional music’s avant-garde potential.

By: Lucy Sante

He was poet laureate of the live ones.

By: Tim Carmody

Each “mistake” or transposition of logic and syntax carried a shift in meaning.

By: Joshua Glenn

Zamyatin’s We isn’t anti-utopian, but anti-anti-utopian.

By: Brian Berger

His U.S.A. trilogy is the ne plus ultra of avant-garde historical fiction.

By: Greg Rowland

His vision glued together the most complex mythological narrative ever.