FICTION
Released: March 9, 1998
"Even Norman Mailer will like this novel."
Another merry riff on Washington power politics, struggles, and failures from the venerable curmudgeon and sage: an appealingly unholy marriage of Burr, Duluth, and a suavely Vidalian amalgam of Tom Sawyer and Tom Swift.
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NONFICTION
Released: Dec. 1, 1998
"This is one of those times."
If Vidal (The Smithsonian Institution, 1998, etc.) isn't the last wild man remaining in the American literary left, then it's hard to say who is.
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FICTION
Released: Feb. 8, 1999
"Essential work, indeed, and a good deal more fun to read than the work of many other highly esteemed writers who take themselves much more seriously."
It must seem no less galling than appropriate to Norman Mailer that not even a year after the appearance of his own bulky retrospective volume (The Time of Our Time) there arrives this bracing sampler of his formidable old enemy's variegated prose wares: on display—in judiciously mixed proportions—are the complete texts of Vidal's once notorious novel Myra Breckenridge (a then-timely jeu to which the years haven't been kind) and his outrageously savvy JFK-inspired play (The Best Man); choice excerpts from the loosely related fictional revisions of American history that began with Burr and extend (thus far) to Washington, D.C., and middling ones from other novels varying in quality from apprentice-like (The City and the Pillar) to dizzyingly inventive (Duluth) and urbane (Julian).
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 19, 2000
"A beguiling conclusion to an invaluable extended work. If Vidal's novels were used as texts, we'd all be American History majors."
Though its narrative temperature remains dangerously low, entertainment value is dependably high in this seventh and last of Vidal's delectable Novels of Empire.
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NONFICTION
Released: May 1, 2001
"Challenging as ever, Vidal quotes Justice Brandeis: "If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for laws; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.""
In a piquant collection (originally published in Italy), Vidal (
The Last Empire, 2001, etc.) asks readers to consider the forces that motivated Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden--and perhaps it wouldn't hurt to heed the beating the Bill of Rights has been taking recently.
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NONFICTION
Released: June 5, 2001
"Vidal's gossip can feel as stale as his (very dated) political concerns, but few today have what he still displays in abundance: the desire, the intelligence, and the wit to continue living as a true man of letters."
