New Releases by Gore Vidal

"Gore Vidal''s reputation as "America''s finest essayist" is an enduring one. Vidal has a gift for writing about the events of the moment with an astuteness usually reserved for the beneficiaries of hindsight, and about events of the past with the familiarity of someone who has just come out of the room where they were happening. This collection, chosen by the author from forty years of work, contains about two thirds of what he has published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the Art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on the French New Novel, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov, Herman Wouk, Italo Calvino, and Montaigne (a previously uncollected essay from 1992). State of the Union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, pornography, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, H. L. Mencken, "The Holy Family" (his famous essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, Reagan, and, finally, "Monotheism and Its Discontents," a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In State of Being, we are given "personal responses to people and events": recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, as well as Tennessee Williams, Anais Nin, making movies, travel, home. A lifetime of work from a writer of enormous intelligence, wit, and style."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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./Pu003e

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.

In een parodie op een Amerikaanse vrouw die niet alleen van sekse verandert, maar ook persoonswisselingen ondergaat, levert schr. kritiek op de mentaliteit van de Nixon-regering.

"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

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. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

THE STORY: The New York Post describes the plot as follows: ...William Russell, the ex-Secretary of State, is a wit and scholar with high liberal principles, beloved of the eggheads and suspected by practical politicians. Joseph Cantwell is a

This is the sequal to Vidal''s novel Myra Breckinridge. It continues the role of Myron, the Myra of the earlier novel, who had undergone a sex-change operation.

The protagonists of this political satire are Richard Nixon, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy.

Two Sisters is Gore Vidal''s fictional memoir of a love affair with a beautiful set of twins in post-war Paris--a story skilfully interwoven with notebooks, diaries & the vivid fragment of a screenplay set in ancient Greece. In seductive settings from a brothel in a Parisian backstreet to the rooftops of 70s Rome, Vidal assembles his characters, real & imagined: Cocteau & Tennessee Williams, Gide & Mailer rub shoulders with creations as unforgettable as the ageing femme fatale Marietta Donegal & Hollywood hustler & flagellant Murray Morris. All are bound together in a mesmerising fiction that builds to an extraordinary conclusion.

Chronicle of the nation''s capital from the New Deal through the McCarthy era, centering on a conservative Senator and his ambitious assistant, both of whom aspire to the Presidency.

This novel tells of a young gay man''s search for love in the closeted years of the 1940s.

This is an uncorrected galley proof of Vidal''s book.

THE STORY: As told by the New York News, VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET is an imaginative affair in which an alien comes from another planet to do a bit of sightseeing and to see or start a war. He thinks he has arrived in time to see the Civil War, whic