William T. Vollmann

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy ; known in the Anglosphere as Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels... of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist.
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Yukio Mishima was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka , a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor and film director. Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mishima was internationally famous and is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. His... avant-garde work displayed a blending of modern and traditional aesthetics that broke cultural boundaries, with a focus on sexuality, death, and political change. He is also remembered for his ritual suicide by seppuku after a failed coup d'état. Mishima was born in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo . His father was Azusa Hiraoka, a government official, and his mother, Shizue, was the daughter of a school principal in Tokyo. His paternal grandparents were Jotarō and Natsuko Hiraoka. He had a younger sister, Mitsuko, who died of typhus, and a younger brother, Chiyuki. Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsu, who took the boy, separating him from his immediate family for several years.
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Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read. Born in... Osaka, Japan, into a well-established doctor's family, Yasunari was orphaned when he was four, after which he lived with his grandparents. He had an older sister who was taken in by an aunt, and whom he met only once thereafter, at the age of ten . Kawabata's grandmother died when he was seven , and his grandfather when he was fifteen . Having lost all close relatives, he moved in with his mother's family . However, in January 1916, he moved into a boarding house near the junior high school to which he had formerly commuted by train. Through many of Kawabata’s works the sense of distance in his life is represented.
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Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym of Isidore-Lucien Ducasse , an Uruguayan-born French poet. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. He died at the age of 24. Ducasse was... born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to François Ducasse, a French consular officer, and his wife Jacquette-Célestine Davezac. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November 1847 in the cathedral of Montevideo and that his mother died soon afterwards, probably due to an epidemic. In 1851, as a five-year-old, he experienced the end of the eight-year siege of Montevideo in the Argentine-Uruguayan war. He was brought up to speak three languages: French, Spanish and English. In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. In 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée Louis Barthou in Pau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy .
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