The inimitable Dorothy Parker is often known more for her sharp wit and cynicism than for her actual work. As with many literary figures, Parker’s life was filled with drama and personal darkness, which often came through in her writing.

Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild August 22, 1893 in West End, New Jersey (now known as Long Branch) to a Jewish father and Scottish mother, J. Henry and Eliza A. (Marston) Rothschild. Dorothy had three considerably older …

According to some definitions, prose was once considered tired, dull writing, without much consideration or thought in composition. No meter, no rhyme, not lyrical or classically pleasing. Later, prose was described as words in order, and poetry was words in their best order, or some such. Raymond Carver wrote prose. He distinguised himself by writing both prose and poetry very well. As he liked to do, we will use simple words here to describe a very complicated man desiring the basics. Not contrived in using …

Jay McInerney was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1955. He graduated from Williams College, a prestigious liberal-arts school in Massachusetts, and allegedly used his social conventions there to get a job at New Yorker Magazine, after which he slam-dunked a book contract and a ton of publicity for his first novel. But we don’t hold this against him, because “Bright Lights, Big City” was actually a hell of a lot of fun to read.

It’s considered by some to be the classic 80s novel, …

Chuck Palahniuk was born on February 21, 1961, and grew up in Burbank, Washington. He studied journalism at the University of Oregon and briefly worked for the Oregonian, a Portland, Oregon newspaper. He then gave this up to try a career as a train mechanic.

According to Palahniuk, he had a life-changing experience one day when he moved to a small house on a hill in Portland where, to his horror, he found himself out of reach of local TV antennas. He feared …

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on Oct 30, 1821. His father was a doctor who aspired to improve his family’s modest standings in Russian society. Young Fyodor (the name is the Russian equivalent of “Theodore”) was brought up to be a religious and hard-working young man, and began training to be a military engineer at a school in St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg was the most intellectual and “European” city in Russia, and the intense, shy young man felt strong attractions to the …

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in an estate on the Russian countryside on August 28, 1828 (old style). He was the fourth child of five in a wealthy and noble family, and held the title of “Count” from birth.

His mother died when he was two years old, but his family held closely together, and Tolstoy would later recall playing fantasy games led by his older brothers, especially one in which the siblings inhabited a secret benevolent society of insect creatures called the “Ant …

“You have only to look at Solomin. A head as clear as the day and a body as strong as an ox. Isn’t that a wonder in itself? Why, any man with us in Russia who has had any brains, or feelings, or a conscience, has always been a physical wreck. Solomin’s heart aches just as ours does; he hates the same things that we hate, but his nerves are of iron and his body is under his full control. He’s a splendid man, I …

Our universe is an intensely vast entity and it may be hard to find anywhere else, our kind of life.We may be the carriers of a unique kind of consciousness but which we are reluctant to explore fully. The field of our consciousness can be as vast as the universe.

Beside our personal & collective consciousness there may be other kinds of consciousnesses which we are reluctant to admit We always act from a very narrow egotistical point of view. Poetry is a way of …

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born in the Ukraine in 1809, only two months after the birth of Edgar Allan Poe across the world. He was a natural observer of the Russian and Ukranian people (the Ukraine was then part of the Russian empire), and his first story, ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’ was published before his twentieth birthday.

Wandering the countryside in the early 1830’s while making a living as a civil servant, he began contributing stories to periodicals. In his …