---

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, and wit who was an integral part of the fin de siècle group of artists who made up the Aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century.  As a young man, he attended Trinity College in Dublin, and then applied for, and won, a demyship at Magdalen College [...]

We’ve all read books that we wished we could live in.  Furthermore, we’ve all read books with characters we wished were real.  While today’s fiction gives us characters like Noah from The Notebook, Edward from Twilight, and a host of other new literary hunks that have captured the hearts and imaginations of girls and women [...]

Perhaps no comic book writer has been more influential and highly venerated as British author Alan Moore.  Widely considered to be one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, comic book authors in history, Moore has redefined the limits and expectations of the medium.  He began working in underground British magazines like 2000AD and Warrior where he [...]

Despite William Shakespeare’s status as a literary giant, a small but vocal group of scholars, playwrights, actors, and conspiracy theorists have long argued that he is not the true author of his plays. Even though the vast majority of Shakespeare scholars have rejected it, this theory has become increasingly prominent since the 1980s, and has [...]

Playboy magazine launched in 1953, reaching its largest circulation in 1972 when it was distributed to 7.2 million readers. Today, it has over 1.5 million readers and over 5 million people visit playboy.com each month. Owner Hugh Hefner has described Playboy magazine as a “handbook for the urban male.” Each issue contains articles on politics and culture, [...]

During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Albert Camus was one of the leading figures in French literature and philosophy, garnering the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 ”for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”. In recent years, Camus’s novels The Stranger and The Plague have become the [...]

Writers have been adding levels of toxicity to their brains and bloodstreams since the beginning of time: self-diagnosing and self-treating their own misery, boredom, or lack of ideas with foreign self-altering substances. Shakespeare (whether personally familiar or not) included notions of an “insane root” in Macbeth to explain the hijacking of normality by paranormal encounters, [...]

From gentle lessons and polite admonitions on the level of a Dr. Seuss to violent and fiery anti-everybody rhetoric pounded out by vicious haters, the satire’s sarcastic and ironic writing style encompasses a wide range of authors, eras, social milieus, and styles. Today, publications such as The Onion and television productions like The Colbert Report [...]

Hunter S. Thompson, an infamous writer and social figure who impacted generations of avid and sometimes obsessive readers, is a primary source of America’s most humorous, reckless, revelatory, and sometimes offensive quotes. In an attempt at capturing the vast essence of his genius I have assembled a list of 10 memorable quotes spanning the many [...]

There’s nothing better than being able to pick up a book one day and sitting down to read it. It’s a wonderful experience being able to find that one book that really grabs your eyes and fingers and doesn’t let you put it down until you’re finished. Finding a book that sucks you in and [...]