literature
Writers who put their names on things when most people wouldn't dare.
Notre Grande Chasublerie
His ceilings were 1.65 metres high, which suited him perfectly. Every guest he ever received had to crouch.
The Diagnosis
What happens when a Soviet prison doctor has to diagnose the man who invented Russian absurdism?
The Man Who Drew the Curtains
He sailed to Tahiti, India, and Japan in 1920 and never left his cabin — so what exactly was he doing in there?
The Code That Wasn't
For decades scholars thought a Swiss novelist's tiny notebooks were a secret code written from inside an asylum.
The Necessary Jew
A terrified little man taught crafts to bored teenagers in Drohobycz and wrote two of the strangest books of the twentieth century, until the SS officer next door decided he wanted a Jew of his own.
Lights Off
She was being read by twelve million people a day and answered every fan letter by hand. So she dynamited a boulder on a treeless rock and built somewhere to hide.
Sei Shōnagon Had Opinions
What kind of person files pear blossoms under "most vulgar thing in the world" and then puts functional tweezers on the same list as the impossibility of lasting love?
The Woman Who Became Her Own Mystery
If the world's greatest mystery writer vanished for eleven days and registered at a hotel under her husband's mistress's name, what exactly was she solving?
The Man Who Called for a Fictional Doctor
A man who had invented 2,472 people died asking one of them to save him.
The Woman Who Wrote From Inside a Wall
A bishop sealed her inside a stone room, and she stayed for forty years — then T.S. Eliot quoted her during the Blitz.
The Knight Whose Insult Became a Mozart Composition
He had a second, fancier iron hand built for Sundays.
The Man Who Could Not Fail
He shipped coal to Newcastle during a miners' strike and sold every piece at a premium.