When John Cave, a mortician by trade, 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. Aided by a relentless public-relations campaign and supported by a "theology" whipped into existence by a historian besotted with love for one of Cave's alluring disciples, Cave's message proves irresistible. Things really start to get out of hand, however, when the notion of "voluntary death" creeps into the doctrine and the world's population is invited to depart from life in "pleasant establishments". A deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy first published in 1954, Messiah eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and "Do", the guru of Heaven's Gate.

Master storyteller Gore Vidal's 1947 classic.Robert Holton has returned from Europe and settled into a solitary existence working for a New York stockbroker. He suppresses memories of nights of love in Florence as he tries to succeed in the city, but when Carla turns up he has to choose between conventionality and the fraught path of love.

Hollywood marks the fifth episode in Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire," his celebrated series of six historical novels that form his extended biography of the United States.         It is 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson is about to lead the country into the Great War in Europe. In California, a new industry is born that will irreversibly transform America. Caroline Sanford, the alluring heroine of Empire, discovers the power of moving pictures to manipulate reality as she vaults to screen stardom under the name of Emma Traxler. Just as Caroline must balance her two lives--West Coast movie star and East Coast newspaper publisher and senator's mistress--so too must America balance its two power centers: Hollywood and Washington.                         Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics.         "Hollywood shimmers with the illusion of politics and the politics of illusion," wrote the Chicago Sun-Times. "A wonderfully literate and consistently impressive work of fiction that clearly belongs on a shelf with Vidal's best," said The New York Times Book Review.         With a new Introduction by the author. From the Hardcover edition.

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 worshiping 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.

Determined to reinvent himself and explore new territory in his work, Gore Vidal published a provocative satirical work destined to be on a collision course with social conventions in 1968. Written as a diary, Myra Breckinridge, someone determined not to be possessed by any man, recounts her day as she lives it out in the Hollywood of the '60s. Feminism, transsexuality, and a host of cinematic jokes abound.

These nineteen essays richly confirm Gore Vidal's reputation as "America's finest essayist" (The New Statesman), and are further evidence of the breadth and depth of his intelligence and wit. Included here are his highly praised essays on Theodore Roosevelt ("An American Sissy"), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson ("This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes"), the need for a new constitutional convention—as well as his controversial study of relations between the homosexual and Jewish communities ("Pink Triangle and Yellow Star"). Vidal's other subjects range from Christopher Isherwood to L. Frank Baum ("The OZ BOoks"), from the question of "Who Makes the Movies?" to the misadventures—religious and financial—of Bert Lance.

The lost pulp crime novel by great American novelist Gore Vidal! Hired to smuggle an ancient artefact out of Egypt, Pete Wells finds himself the target of killers and femme fatales - and just one step away from triggering a revolution that will set Cairo aflame!

Empire, the fourth novel in Gore Vidal's monumental six-volume chronicle of the American past, is his prodigiously detailed portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century as it begins to emerge as a world power.

Fourty-four essays on literature, politicking in government and in literary circles, and such celebrated contemporary characters as Norman Mailer, Dr. David Reuben, and Susan Sontag by the man Alfred Krazin has called "one of the best-informed and most biting polemicists of our overgrown American way of life."

A literary cause célèbre 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.

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...

“I exist to say, 'No, that isn't the way it is,' or 'What you believe to be true is not true for the following reasons.' I am a master of the obvious. I mean, if there's a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there's a hole in the road and if you don't fill it in you'll break the axle of your car. One is not loved for being helpful."Gore Vidal, one of America's foremost essayists, screenwriters, and novelists, died July 31, 2012. He was, in addition, a terrific conversationalist. Dick Cavett once described him as “the best talker since Oscar Wilde." And Vidal was never more eloquent, or caustic, than when let loose on his favorite topic, the history and politics of the United States.This book is made up from four interviews conducted with his long-time interlocutor, the writer and radio host Jon Wiener, in which Vidal grapples with matters evidently close to his heart: the history of the American Empire, the rise of the National Security...

Written by "America's finest essayist" (New Statesman), At Home brings together twenty-four essays on subjects ranging from Henry James to Nancy Reagan, Oscar Wilde to Oliver North, Hollywood to Mongolia. From the leaders and lunacies of contemporary America to reminiscences of his own childhood, whether answering his own critics or excoriating the current state of literature, Gore Vidal is, as always, elegant, incisive, and brilliant. "As provocative and perceptive a social and literary critic as America has today." –Newsweek "[Vidal's] pieces grab one's attention and refuse to let go. At once forthright and mendacious, smart and demented, they're written...with panache, vigor and a caustic, often perverse wit...As a stylist he's almost a national treasure." –Wall Street Journal "I can't think of any writer more certain to have exactly the right opinion on absolutely everything." –Washington...

"May well be the finest of contemporary novels about the capital."THE NEW YORKERFrom the New Deal to the McCarthy era, follow the lives of Blaise Sanford, the ruthless Washington newspaper tycoon...his son, Peter, a brilliant liberal editor both fascinated and repelled by the imperial city...Peter's beautiful and self-destructive sister, Enid...her husband, Clay Overbury, a charismatic and ambitious politician...and James Burden Day, the powerful conservative senator. In WASHINGTON, D.C., the incomparable Vidal presents the life of politics and society in the nation's capital in the final stages of "the last empire on Earth."

The Golden Age is the concluding volume in Gore Vidal's celebrated and bestselling Narratives of Empire series-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...