Vidal's historical novel set in the 5th century BC and narrated by Cyrus Spitama, son of a Persian prince and Greek sorceress, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster, and ambassador to the courts of India, China and Greece. Pericles, Thucydides, Sophocles and Confucius are among the book's characters.
Here is the story of arguably America's finest hour; of the time when the twentieth century dawned, Queen Victoria died, and America, basking deliciously in excess wealth, rather thought it might snap up an empire of its own. Yet while politicians muse over the potential of China or the Philippines - even Russia - empires are being built at home; railway empires; industrial empires; newspaper empires. Into this arena float the delectable Caroline Sanford, putative heiress and definite catch. Caroline is an oddity; she has been raised in France where they teach rich girls to talk and think. American society women, required only to think of themselves as the most interesting beings on earth, are rather alarmed. American men are amused - until Caroline shirks from marriage, sues her brother, buys a newspaper, and becomes that even greater oddity - a powerful woman. Mingling with the movers and shakers of the day - with President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolf Hearst, Henry James, the Astors, Vanderbilts and Whitneys - Caroline Sanford echoes the glorious passage of the United States as it sweeps into a new century, reaching boldly for the world.
Investigative journalist and aviatrix Teddy, who narrates Gore Vidal's metaphysical thriller, has moulded herself on flying ace Amelia Earhart. Although she's aware that's a bit anachronistic, it qualifies her to pilot Kalki, Vietnam vet and incarnate of Vishnu, round Kathmandu in a story that soars from New Orleans to Washington, Paris to New Delhi - ever above and outside of this world ...
When two women tragically perish in a Duluth snowdrift, the one called Edna is reborn in 'Duluth', the popular television series and the one called Beryl finds herself in a 'Hyatt Regency' romantic novel entitled ROGUE DUKE. In Duluth they do it all with word processors. Meanwhile Lieutenant Darlene Ecks, strip-search enthusiast, terrorizes a barrio full of illegal Mexican immigrants until they rise up in defiance, the mayor plumbs the mysteries of a bright red spaceship and a life and death contest is waged between Duluth's leading socialite and its foremost author to complete contradictory biographies of Betty Grable. Gore Vidal's wicked extravaganza sports special effects not expected in a novel; and it poses taunting puzzles like who is the guy they call The Dude? And why is it said, 'Every society gets the Duluth it deserves'?
POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION refers to a form of navigation Gore Vidal 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 eluded (mostly) during his eventful life.
From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society, 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, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, 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.
It is a risky (and risque) business becoming 'Woman Triumphant' - exercising total power over men like Rusty Godowski. Rusty just wants to be a Hollywood star like everyone else at Buck Loner's academy, but now that Buck's niece, Myra Breckinridge, has arrived, the curriculum is taking a wildly strange turn. Willing to risk all to be superb and unique, Myra means to prove to her old friend Dr Montag that it is possible to work out in life all one's fantasies - and survive.'From Myra's fist appearnce on the page she was a megastar', explains her creator, Gore Vidal. Myra caused a second furore when she returned in Myron to battle it out with her eponymous alter ego, a drab little man fallen into marriage and a job in Chinese catering. Theirs is a contest of hormonal roulette, with glorious Myra off on time-travelling missions of mercy back to 1948 to try to change cinema history and to introduce her own radical theories of popuation control. Meanwhile Myron tries desperately to stay in the present as inconspicuously as Mrya will allow.
Gore Vidal's new collection of essays shows him still writing at his finest. His comments on the deplorable state of American politics - from Bill Clinton to George Bush - are as apposite as ever and, controversially, there are two magnificent essays on the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh - who entered into an extraordinary correspondence with Vidal when he was in gaol - to the recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
Gore Vidal's classic novel of Aaron Burr - the man who shot Alexander Hamilton.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, intriguingly, to novelists and historians?
