Summary
Excerpts from the novels, plus four uncollected essays.
Customer Reviews
Review this book!
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 1999
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.75 x 10 inches
Weight: 3 pounds
Pages: 988
Publisher's Notes
The range and size of Gore Vidal's literary achievement is remarkable. He is a master of the historical novel, in which he has explored American history, ancient history, and the history of religion. He has developed his own style of science fiction combined with satire, and in the books he refers to as his "inventions" he writes cautionary tales about sex, politics, art, and philosophy. He is at once a contrarian, a wise man, and a romantic. He is also wickedly funny, and often outrageous. All of these qualities are evident in his essays, which deal with things about which he feels passionately.He writes about other writers--Tennessee Williams, Henry James, Montaigne, Edmund Wilson--and about public life, and his own life, which has been complicated and rich. This collection (the only single volume that includes both Vidal's fiction and his essays) contains two complete long works--Myra Breckinridge, perhaps his most famous novel, and The Best Man, a play about the American presidency. There are selections from The City and the Pillar, his early, controversial novel about homosexual love, and excerpts from such later works as Julian, Duluth, and Live from Golgotha. Selections from the American history novels--Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.--have been woven together to provide a continuous narrative. There are twenty-five essays here, on the many subjects that have engaged Vidal during his long career. The editor, Fred Kaplan, who is writing the first major biography of Vidal, has provided an introduction to the work as a whole as well as an introductory explanation of each selection. He has also prepared a biographical chronology and a bibliography.Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, appeared in the spring of 1946, when he was nineteen years old and just out of the Army. Since then he has written twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Thomas Carlyle: A Biography; Charles Dickens: A Biography; and Henry James: The Imagination of a Genius.
Similar books
The Vietnam Reader
by
The Vietnam Reader is a selection of the finest and best-known art from the American war in Vietnam, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, film, still photos, and popular song lyrics. All the strongest work is here, from mainstream bestsellers to radical poetry, from Tim OBrien to Marvin Gaye. Also included are incisive reader's questions--useful for educators and book clubs--in a volume that makes an essential contribution to a wider understanding of the Vietnam War.This authoritative and accessible volume is sure to become a classic reference, as well as indispensable and provocative reading for anyone who wants to know more about the war that changed the face of late-twentieth-century America.
Marking the Sparrow's Fall
by Wallace Stegner
Winner of three O. Henry Awards, the Commonwealth Gold Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, and recipient of both the P.E.N. Center USA West and the California Arts Council award for his body of work, Wallace Stegner is a literary giant. In Marking the Sparrow's Fall, the first collection published since Wallace Stegner's death in 1993, his son Page has annotated and edited fifteen essays that have never before been published in books, a little-known novella, and Wallace Stegner's most powerful and well-known essays on the American West, which held sway in Stegner's vivid prose: It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. . . . Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall. --from Wolf Willow Each magical piece of writing collected here reveals the stylistic grace, humorous outlook, and intellectual rigor that earned Stegner his enormous readership and fame.
Longer Stories
by Shelby Foote
Collects eleven stories depicting the greed, corruption, and other problems assailing Russian society in the author's later years.
Love in a Blue Time
by Hanif Kureishi
In these ten wry and exhilarating stories, Hanif Kureishis, author of THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA, THE BLACK ALBUM, and of the screenplays for MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE, SAMMY AND ROSIE GET LAID, LONDON KILLS ME, and MY SON THE FANATIC, brilliantly captures the passion and folly of the human comedy. Written over the span of a decade, LOVE IN A BLUE TIME reveals the essence of a generation--from the liberating irreverence of the seventies to the dilemmas and disillusionments of the nineties.
Screwjack and Other Stories
by Hunter S. Thompson
Originally published in 1991 as a limited edition, this anthology of "screwball" stories from the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary includes "Mesolito," "Death of the Poet," and "Screwjack."
|
0 items in cart
Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved. Some content for books is owned by Baker & Taylor, Inc. or its licensors and is subject to copyright and all other protections provided by applicable law.
