Product Description

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 his triumphs writing in other genres.

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. However, an eighth story was recently discovered among Vidal’s private papers at Harvard University. Entitled Clouds and Eclipses, the story is based on a true account from the childhood of Tennessee Williams. Taking its name from that lost story, this collection brings Vidal’s body of short fiction to completion for the first time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #783846 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780786718108
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
The rediscovery of the previously unpublished title work is the occasion for collecting Vidal's short stories—all eight of them—for the first time. That piece, which closes the collection, features an episode from Tennessee Williams's childhood in which the young playwright decides to pre-empt sin through suicide, a decision complicated by knowledge that his uncle is being blackmailed for sexual misconduct with a minor. Discretion kept this story from Vidal's 1956 collection A Thirsty Evil, but it's clearly continuous with the seven others, many of which also contain homoerotic elements and a tone of tart disillusion: in "Three Stratagems," a suave young man suffers an epileptic seizure before he can sell his body; in "The Zenner Trophy," a prep school athlete is expelled for an affair with a male classmate. Mortality and shades of E.B. White's famous distortions of time enter as well, as a middle-aged man runs into himself as a boy ("A Moment of Green Laurel"), and another spends a night in his childhood bedroom ("The Ladies in the Library"). Vidal's short-form execution is strangely ineffective: he often locates action off the page, then labors to bring the information into the story cleanly. But readers will recognize the frosty vision and frequently artful prose of the essayist of United States and the novelist of Myra Breckinridge. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
These eight short stories from one of the most highly regarded contemporary American writers, who is, however, much better known as a historical novelist and provocative essayist, represent--present--Vidal's obvious capability in the form. This is the first time all of his short pieces have been published together. In his trademark highly polished style, burnished to a fine sheen, Vidal shows an acceptance of and even dexterity in facing the requirement of being brief. Whether he is writing about older men picking up younger ones in Key West, private-school adventures, or what expatriates in Rome are up to, his tone is sophisticated, his stories informed by an all-the-right-places kind of sensibility. A certain Somerset Maugham urbanity imbues every piece, injected with such lines as "By the time I was ten I do recall that I talked almost entirely in sonorous cliches and I had begun to demonstrate an alarming talent for didactic poetry." Vidal is, of course, cosmopolitan to his fingertips, and this is a book for comprehensive public library fiction collections. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and a memoir. Winner of the National Book Award for United Sates: Essays 1952-92, Vidal lives in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Uneven
I enjoyed the short preface very much, but the stories were of uneven quality. "Erlinda and Mr. Coffin" is exotic, fun, and while some social observations are made, it is a story written for the pleasure of spinning a tale. "Pages from an Abandoned Journal" is interesting and offers some insight into the lifestyle of a segment of the gay population. "Clounds and Eclipses", the hitherto unpublished story based on a childhood recollection of Tennessee Williams, is without merit, and the first story of the collection should be skipped.