Gore Vidal Books In Order

Death in the Fifth Position

In Death in the Fifth Position, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is hired by a ballet company on the eve of a major upcoming performance. Handling the press seems to be no problem, but when a rising star in the company is killed during the performance dropped from thirty feet above the stage, crashing to her death in a perfect fifth position Sargent has a real case on his hands. As he ingratiates himself with the players behind the scenes especially one lovely young ballerina, he finds that this seemingly graceful ballet company is performing their most dramatic acts behind the curtain. There are sharp rivalries, sordid affairs, and shady characters. Sargent, though, has no trouble staying on point and proving that the ballerina killer is no match for his keen eye and raffish charm.

Death Before Bedtime

In Death Before Bedtime, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is invited to the home of a venerable senator to help strategize his imminent run for president. On the night before he’s to announce, though, the senator is murdered in his bed. No longer needed as a political publicist, Sargent finds himself helping the police find the killer. He deftly navigates an eccentric cast of characters, all of whom are suspects: the rebellious daughter; the sycophantic aide; the grieving widow; and the power hungry governor with his eye on the senator s job. Somehow, between charming the senator s daughter and glad handing Washington s elite, Sargent still manages to methodically put the pieces into place and sees that politics truly is a cut throat business.

Death Likes It Hot

In Death Likes It Hot, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargeant travels out to a posh beach community to help a wealthy socialite plan an end of summer party. His enjoyment of the sun, the surf, and the company of a lovely young fashion reporter is interrupted by the death of the socialite’s niece: she mysteriously drowns while swimming on a crowded beach. No one suspects murder until the police find a lethal dose of sleeping pills in her system. As Sargeant watches the police’s investigation unfold, he keeps an eye on the grieving socialite; the victim’s famous painter husband; a suspiciously cheery brother and sister; and a garrulous tabloid columnist. Now, instead of planning guest lists, wine choices, and menus, Sargeant is faced with a killer unlike he’s ever faced: highly sophisticated, devilishly clever, and just as smooth as he is.

Washington, D.C.

With a New IntroductionWashington, D.C., is the final installment in Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire,his acclaimed six volume series of historical novels about the American past. It offers an illuminating portrait of our republic from the time of the New Deal to the McCar thy era. Widely regarded as Vidal’s ultimate comment on how the American political system degrades those who participate in it, Washington, D.C. is a stunning tale of corruption and diseased ambitions. It traces the fortunes of James Burden Day, a powerful conservative senator who is eyeing the presidency; Clay Overbury, a pragmatic young congressional aide with political aspirations of his own; and Blaise Sanford, a ruthless newspaper tycoon who understands the importance of money and image in modern politics. With characteristic wit and insight, Vidal chronicles life in the nation’s capital at a time when these men and others transformed America into ‘possibly the last empire on earth.”Washington, D.C. may well be the finest of contemporary novels about the capital,’ said The New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement deemed it ‘a prodigiously skilled and clever performance.’From the Hardcover edition.

Burr

In 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Three years later, on the order of President Thomas Jefferson, he was tried for treason: for plotting to dismember the United States. Gore Vidal, romping iconoclastically through American history, debunks, in this historical novel of Burr’s life, the common and casually held notion of the man as a scoundrel and an adventurer. Instead he appears as one of the ‘host of choice spirits’ forced to live among coarse, materialistic, hypocritical people ? among them Jefferson and Hamilton. Here, the latter appears as a power hungry ‘parvenu’ from the West Indies and the former as a semi literate slave owning tyrant. American politics, suggests Vidal, had a penchant for the vulgar. Even then. Veering backwards to the revolution and the early days of the republic, stopping at dinner parties on the way, and reaching forward to the future, BURR is a novel about treason, both the particular and in general. For what, asks Vidal, really belongs to whom? What properly belongs to the Constitution, to the nation, to the family ?even to novelists and historians?

1876

The third volume of Gore Vidal’s magnificent series of historical novels aimed at demythologizing the American past, 1876 chronicles the political scandals and dark intrigues that rocked the United States in its centennial year. Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, Aaron Burr’s unacknowledged son, returns to a flamboyant America after his long, self imposed European exile. The narrator of Burr has come home to recoup a lost fortune by arranging a suitable marriage for his beautiful daughter, the widowed Princess d’Agrigente, and by ingratiating himself with Samuel Tilden, the favored presidential candidate in the centennial year. With these ambitions and with their own abundant charms, Schuyler and his daughter soon find themselves at the centers of American social and political power at a time when the fading ideals of the young republic were being replaced by the excitement of empire. ‘A glorious piece of writing,’ said Jimmy Breslin in Harper’s. ‘Vidal can take history and make it powerful and astonishing.’ Time concurred: ‘Vidal has no peers at breathing movement and laughter into the historical past.’ With a new Introduction by the author. From the Hardcover edition.

Lincoln

Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers. To most Americans, Abraham Lincoln is a monolithic figure, the Great Emancipator and Savior of the Union, beloved by all. In Gore Vidal’s Lincoln we meet Lincoln the man and Lincoln the political animal, the president who entered a besieged capital where most of the population supported the South and where even those favoring the Union had serious doubts that the man from Illinois could save it. Far from steadfast in his abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln agonizes over the best course of action and comes to his great decision only when all else seems to fail. As the Civil War ravages his nation, Lincoln must face deep personal turmoil, the loss of his dearest son, and the harangues of a wife seen as a traitor for her Southern connections. Brilliantly conceived, masterfully executed, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln allows the man to breathe again.

Empire

‘Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider’s sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer I can think of. And like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama.’ The New York Times Book ReviewIn this extraordinarily powerful epic Gore Vidal recreates America’s Gilded Age a period of promise and possibility, of Empire building and fierce political rivalries. In a vivid and beathtaking work of fiction, where the fortunes of a sister and brother intertwine with the fates of the generation, their country, and some of the greatest names of their day, including President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, William and Henry James, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys, Gore Vidal sweeps us from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, from the salvaged republic of Lincoln to a nation boldly reaching for the world. From the Paperback edition.

Hollywood

‘Wicked and provocative…
Vidal’s purview of Hollywood in one of its golden ages is fascinating.’ Chicago TribuneIn his brilliant and dazzling new novel, Gore Vidal sweeps us into one of the most fascinating periods of American political and social change. The time is 1917. In Washington, President Wilson is about to lead the United States into the Great War. In California, a new industry is born that will transform America: moving pictures. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re create it: brim*ming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics, from Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the author’s own grandfather, the blind Senator Gore. With Hollywood, Vidal once again proves himself a superb storyteller and a perceptive chronicler of human nature’s endless deceptions. From the Paperback edition.

The Golden Age

The Golden Age is the concluding volume in Gore Vidal’s celebrated and bestselling American empire novels a unique pageant of the national experience from the United States’ entry into World War Two to the end of the Korean War. The historical novel is once again in vogue, and Gore Vidal stands as its undisputed American master. In his six previous narratives of the American empire Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C. he has created a fictional portrait of our nation from its founding that is unmatched in our literature for its scope, intimacy, political intelligence, and eloquence. Each has been a major bestseller, and some have stirred controversy for their decidedly ironic and unillusioned view of the realities of American power and of the men and women who have exercised that power. The Golden Age is Vidal’s crowning achievement, a vibrant tapestry of American political and cultural life from 1939 to 1954, when the epochal events of World War Two and the Cold War transformed America, once and for all, for good or ill, from a republic into an empire. The sharp eyed and sympathetic witnesses to these events are Caroline Sanford, Washington, D.C., newspaper publisher turned Hollywood pioneer producer star, and Peter Sanford, her nephew and publisher of the independent intellectual journal The American Idea. They experience at first hand the masterful maneuvers of Franklin Roosevelt to bring a reluctant nation into World War Two, and later, the actions of Harry Truman that commit the nation to a decades long twilight struggle against Communism developments they regard with a marked skepticism, even though they end in an American global empire. The locus of these events is Washington, D.C., yet the Hollywood film industry and the cultural centers of New York also play significant parts. In addition to presidents, the actual characters who appear so vividly in the pages of The Golden Age include Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Wendell Willkie, William Randolph Hearst, Dean Acheson, Tennessee Williams, Joseph Alsop, Dawn Powell and Gore Vidal himself. The Golden Age offers up United States history as only Gore Vidal can, with unrivaled penetration, wit, and high drama, allied to a classical view of human fate. It is a supreme entertainment that will also change readers’ understanding of American history and power.

Williwaw

A gripping tale of men struggling against nature and themselves, Williwaw was Gore Vidal’s first novel, written at nineteen when he was first mate of the U.S. Army freight supply ship stationed in the Aleutian Islands. Here he writes of a ship caught plying the lethal, frigid Arctic waters during storm season. Tensions run high among the edgy crew and uneasy passengers even before the cruel wind that gives the book its title suddenly sweeps down from the mountains. Vividly drawn characters and a compelling murder plot combine to make Williwaw a classic war novel.

The City and the Pillar & Seven Early Stories

A literary cause c l bre when first published more than fifty years ago, Gore Vidal’s now classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experience. Jim, a handsome, all American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in awful kid stuff, the experience forms Jim s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship. Along the way he struggles with what he feels is his unique bond with Bob and with his persistent attraction to other men. Upon finally encountering Bob years later, the force of his hopes for a life together leads to a devastating climax. The first novel of its kind to appear on the American literary landscape, The City and the Pillar remains a forthright and uncompromising portrayal of sexual relationships between men.

A Search for the King

Kidnapped and held to ransom by Duke Leopold of Austria after the Third Crusade, Richard the Lion Heart, it is said, was found by his faithful troubadour Blondel de Neel. But how? And what trials did the faithful and long suffering lyricist have to overcome to find his king? Gore Vidal paints a broad, colourful and poignant picture of a man searching for his master; for the symbolic king who is the goal of man’s eternal quest; for the spiritual centre of his life.

Dark Green, Bright Red

In the tiny Central American republic of Tenango, a place of orchid scented jungle, crumbling palaces and baroque cathedrals, the rainy season is over and the dusty days of winter have begun. It is time for revolution. In an old plantation house the conspirators meet: General Jorge Alvarez, returned from exile in New Orleans with his hothead of a son and his proud, beautiful daughter; a volatile entourage of disenchanted colonels and rebel priests; and Peter Nelson, an American soldier of fortune with his own reasons for joining the rebels. Yet when the waiting is over and the struggle for power under way, nothing in Tenango turns out to be what it seems, not even the tragedy that awaits them all.

The Judgment Of Paris

Set in post war Europe, fresh out of law school Philip Warren takes a year to discover his future. In this classic coming of age story, Philip journeys through various affairs, misadventures, and cities full of unforgettable characters that prompt his self discovery and lessons on taking pleasure in both love and life.

Messiah

When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Now available in a Penguin Classic edition, Gore Vidal’s deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

Julian

The remarkable bestseller about the fourth century Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, Julian is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal’s finest historical novels. Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign. A marvelously imaginative and insightful novel of classical antiquity, Julian captures the religious and political ferment of a desperate age and restores with blazing wit and vigor the legacy of an impassioned ruler.

Kalki

Bestselling author Gore Vidal joins the ranks of Penguin Classics. To satisfy a public that longs for a savior, Vidal’s eponymous hero of Kalki, born and bred in America’s Midwest, establishes himself in Nepal, puts out the word that he is the last incarnation of the god Vishnu, and predicts an imminent apocalypse meant to cleanse the planet.

Creation

A sweeping novel of politics, war, philosophy, and adventure in a restored edition, featuring never before published material from Gore Vidal’s original manuscript Creation offers a captivating grand tour of the ancient world. Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athens the Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Socrates Cyrus recounts his days as he strives to resolve the fundamental questions that have guided his life s journeys: how the universe was created, and why evil was created with good. In revisiting the fifth century b.c. one of the most spectacular periods in history Gore Vidal illuminates the ideas that have shaped civilizations for millennia.

Duluth

‘A wild spoof of absolutely everything: social pretenses, law enforcement, marriage, open marriage, racism, literature, television, science fiction, and sex. Dozens of plots perk along at an amazing pace…
. raunchy, dirty, outrageous, rife with cliches and often very funny.’ People’One of the most brilliant, most radical, and most subversive pieces of writing to emerge from America in recent years.’ The New Statesman’Vidal belongs to that group of writers of our time who, precisely because they have always kept their eyes open to the disorders and distortions of our age, have chosen irony, humor, comedy in other words, the whole range of literary instruments belonging to the universe of the laugh as their means of settling accounts.’ Italo Calvino

Live from Golgotha

When network executives travel back in time in order to broadcast the crucifixion of Christ, they find their plans complicated by a cyberpunk hacker intent on erasing Christianity with a computer virus. By the author of Myra Breckenridge.Tour.

The Smithsonian Institution

It’s 1939, and a teenage math genius is mysteriously summoned to The Smithsonian Institution, where a crash program to develop the atomic bomb is being conducted in the baseme*nt. The boy turns out to hold the key to both the secrets of nuclear fission and breakthroughs in the time continuum. As he brainstorms with Robert Oppenheimer, he catches a glimpse of the coming war and becomes determined to ward off the cataclysm. In a race against time and surrounded by figures from American history past and present, including Albert Einstein, Grover Cleveland, and Abraham Lincoln he battles to save not just himself, but humanity. Gore Vidal has written some of the finest and most inventive novels in modern times. Readers of such bestsellers as Burr, Lincoln, Duluth, and 1876 will revel in this, his latest foray into the American scene. A brilliant and vividly imaginative tale about some of the key events of the twentieth century, The Smithsonian Institution is a dramatic masterwork of comedy and allusion.

The Best Man

The Best Man crackles with the smart lines and situations inherent to the work of Gore Vidal. The political intrigues rampant in Vidals 1960 setting are strangly similar to the political intrigues of the present day. This darkly satirical drama finds two presidential contenders seeking the endorseme*nt of an aging ex president and explores how personal agendas can change the course of a nations destiny. A L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance featuring: Terrence Currier, Johnny Holliday, Naomi Jacobson, Timmy Ray James, Michael Kramer, Marsha Mason, Paul Morella, Kevin Murray, Judy Simmons, Gary Sloan and Senator Fred Thompson.

A Thirsty Evil

From the poignant realisation as an adult of the cruel brutality of childhood in ‘The Robin’, man then comes face to face with himself as a boy in ‘A Moment of Green Laurel’: both stories combining the nostalgia and fear that haunt us all in old age. Meanwhile, in ‘Erlinda and Mr Coffin’, Southern etiquette is unashamedly turned upside down in a tale of amateur theatricals reminiscent of Dickens and Victorian melodrama. Yet it is in ‘Three Stratagems’, ‘The Zenner Trophy’, ‘Pages from an Abandoned Journal’ and ‘The Ladies in the Library’ with more than a hint of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in the latter that we see Vidal as we know him best: cynical and provocative in these subtle tales of what was known in those days as ‘sexual inversion’.

The Essential Gore Vidal

Vidal writes with ease and grace, and roams through many subjects and genres. 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 contrarion, a wise man, and a romantic. He is also wickedly funny, and often outrageous. This collection the only single volume that includes Vidal’s fiction and his essays contains two complete works MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, 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 later works as JULIAN, DULUTH, and LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA. Selections from the American history novels BURR, LINCOLN, 1876, EMPIRE, and WASHINGTON, D.C. have been woven together to provide a continuous narrative.

Clouds and Eclipses

Celebrated for more than fifty years as a world renowned novelist, essayist, and political figure and commentator, Gore Vidal is less known for the exquisitely crafted short fiction he wrote as a young man. Like the work of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, his stories have been overshadowed by the author’s triumphs writing in other genres. Still, Vidal’s short fiction offers us a portrait of the young artist in the 1940s and 1950s. His subtle and comic tales often center on adolescence and homosexual themes. In Three Stratagems, a middle aged gay man encounters a male prostitute while vacationing in Key West. In The Zenner Trophy, the star athlete at an elite boys school is expelled for sexual relations with a classmate. These stories were gathered along with five others into a 1956 volume, A Thirsty Evil, and for decades were thought to comprise Vidal’s complete short fiction.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Six essays on the theme of empire and republic, with particular focus on the national security state and the failure of the U.S. economic system./P

Screening History

Vidal intertwines fond recollections of films savored in the movie palaces of his Washington, D.C., boyhood with strands of autobiography and trenchant observations about American politics. Never before has the renowned author revealed so much about his own life or written with such immediacy about the forces shaping America. 26 halftones.

United States 1952-1992

From the age of Eisenhower to the dawning of the Clinton era, Gore Vidal’s United States offers an incomparably rich tapestry of American intellectual and political life in a tumultuous period. It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Palimpsest

This is a memoir of the first 40 years of Gore Vidal’s life, ranging back and forth across a rich history. He spent his childhood in Washington DC, in the household of his grandfather, the blind senator from Oklahoma, T.P. Gore, and in the various domestic situations of his complicated and exasperating mother, Nina. Then come schooldays at St Albans and Exeter; the army; life as a literary wunderkind in New York, London, Rome and Paris in the ’40s and ’50s; sex in an age of promiscuity; and a campaign for Congress in 1960. His cast includes Tennessee Williams, the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman Capote, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Christopher Isherwood, Jack Kerouac, Jane and Paul Bowles, Santayana, Anais Nin, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, among others.

Sexually Speaking

Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking presents the author’s often provocative and always engaging thoughts on sexuality. Here, fourteen essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot button topics such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay bashing and the U.S. Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac. Vidal s erudition, candor, and exceptional sense of humor shine. San Francisco Chronicle

The Last Empire

Like his National Book Award winning United States, Gore Vidal’s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire, affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects. From his celebrated profiles of Clare Boothe Luce and Charles Lindbergh and his controversial essay about the Bill of Rights which sparked an extended correspondence with convicted Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh to his provocative analyses of literary icons such as John Updike and Mark Twain and his trenchant observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, Vidal weaves a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Written between the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and the electoral crisis of 2000, The Last Empire is a sweeping coda to the last century s conflicted vision of the American dream.

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

The United States has been engaged in what the great historian Charles A. Beard called ‘Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.’ The Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly 200 military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor. In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 deemed too controversial to publish until now Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following both September 11th and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City: these were simply the acts of ‘evil doers.’

Dreaming War

When Gore Vidal’s recent New York Times bestseller Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace was published, the Los Angeles Times described Vidal as the last defender of the American republic. In Dreaming War, Vidal continues this defense by confronting the Cheney Bush junta head on in a series of devastating essays that demolish the lies American Empire lives by, unveiling a counter history that traces the origins of America’s current imperial ambitions to the experience of World War Two and the post war Truman doctrine. And now, with the Cheney Bush leading us into permanent war, Vidal asks whose interests are served by this doctrine of pre emptive war? Was Afghanistan turned to rubble to avenge the 3,000 slaughtered on September 11? Or was ‘the unlovely Osama chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan?’ After all he was abruptly replaced with Saddam Hussein once the Taliban were overthrown. And while ‘evidence’ is now being invented to connect Saddam with 9/11, the current administration are not helped by ‘stories in the U.S. press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must for the sake of the free world be reassigned to U.S. consortiums.’

Inventing a Nation

One of the master stylists of American literature, Gore Vidal now provides us with his uniquely irreverent take on America’s founding fathers, bringing them to life at key moments of decision in the birthing of our nation. Pure Vidal…
. Inventing a Nation is his edgy tribute to the way we were before the fall. Los Angeles Times Book Review Vidal offers details that enliven and…
reflections on the past that point sharply to today. Richard Eder, New York Times An engaging and…
unblinking view of our national heroes by one who cherishes them, warts and all. Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books Vidal s quick wit flickers over the canonical tale of our republic s founding, turning it into a dark and deliciously nuanced comedy of men, manners, and ideas. Amanda Heller, Boston Sunday Globe This entertaining and enlightening reappraisal of the Founders is a must for buffs of American civilization and its discontents. Booklist Gore Vidal…
still understands American history backwards and forwards as few writers ever have. David Kipen, National Public Radio

Imperial America

Following the publication of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War comes award winning Gore Vidal’s long awaited conclusion to his landmark, best selling trilogy. Now, Vidal has written his most devastating exploration of Imperial America to date. ‘Not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California’ Vidal writes, ‘has an American government been so nakedly predatory.’ Bush’s apparent invincibility, and what he might or might not know especially about those new ‘black box’ voting machines being installed all over the country is one of the central themes of ‘State of the Union 2004,’ a magnificent and witty Olympian survey of American Empire, where the war on terror is judged as nonsensical as the ‘war on dandruff,’ where America is an ‘Enron Pentagon prison,’ a land of ballooning budget deficits thanks to the growth of a garrison state, tax cuts for the privileged, and the creeping totalitarianism of the Ashcroft justice department. Collected in this volume are Vidal’s earlier State of the Union addresses, a tradition inaugurated on the David Susskind show in the early seventies as a counterpoint to ‘whoever happened to be president.’

Point to Point Navigation

The brilliant sequel to Gore Vidal s acclaimed, bestselling memoir, Palimpsest.

In Point to Point Navigation, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal ranges freely over his remarkable life with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his. The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II. As he says, As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather. It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards mostly eluded during his eventful life and for the way this memoir proceeds far from linear but always on course.

From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics and international society where he has cut a broad swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made and on a number of occasions lost. Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, sketched with a draftsman’s ease and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs, are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams the Glorious Bird , Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book s most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.

Elegiac yet vital and even ornery, Point to Point Navigation is a summing up of Gore Vidal s time on the planet that manages to be at once supremely entertaining, endlessly provocative, and thoroughly moving.

The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist is America’s premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay. This long needed volume comprises some twenty four of his forays into criticism, reviewing, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. Among them are such classics as ‘The Top Ten Best Sellers,’ Dawn Powell: The American Writer, Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy,’ ‘Po*rnography,’ and ‘The Second American Revolution. Edited and introduced by Gore Vidal’s literary executor, Jay Parini, it will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.

Snapshots in History’s Glare

This book is Gore Vidal’s visual memoir of his remarkable and famously well lived life. In this collection of photographs, letters, manuscripts, and other selections from Vidal’s vast personal archives, readers are now escorted by one of America’s wittiest insiders into the Kennedys’ Camelot, as well as onto the set of Ben Hur, and into the private lives of Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, and Tennessee Williams, to name just a few. Born into public life, here Vidal looks back on his days as an Army officer in WWII, his rise as a groundbreaking and controversial novelist, his years in Hollywood, his forays into the political arena, and his notoriously public triumphs and feuds. Written with Vidal’s legendary wit and literary elegance, this book reveals not only the personal reflections of one of the last of the great generation of American writers, but also a captivating social history of the 20th century told by one of our great raconteurs.