Selected Essays

Description

'Vidal has a fierce, uncontaminated sense of what's right and wrong, and he expresses his most intimate opinions fearlessly' - John Simpson, Daily Mail This new selection brings together the best of Gore Vidal's essays, comment and criticism from his fifty-year writing career. With mercurial intelligence and often courageous - and outrageous! - forthrightness, Vidal explores his keystone subjects: primarily the worlds of literature and US politics; but also showbiz, sexuality and modern manners. His gaze ranges from the fiction of Calvino and Updike to the politics of pornography to the Clinton and Bush administrations, America post-September 11 and contemporary imperial ambitions. These essays are a witty and brilliant assessment of our times from the most memorable of American literary masters.

GORE VIDAL the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, numerous screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and the critically lauded PALIMPSEST: A MEMOIR. He lives in California.

**'There is no one quite like him, and if you do not know his work you should' Erica Wagner, THE TIMES **'Gore Vidal is the most elegant, erudite and eclectic writer of his generation' Roy Hattersley, GUARDIAN **'A figure whose vibrant verbal presence has itself been an essential of part of American cultural life for the past fifty-odd years' Sylvia Brownrigg, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT