Saturday, November 10, 2007
Author Obit: Norman Mailer, 1923-2007
Iconic and stridently opinionated American author Norman Mailer died early this morning of kidney failure, about a month after surgery to remove scar tissue around his lungs. He became famous for The Naked And The Dead, published in 1948, a "World War II tale [that] is universally recognized as one of the best war novels to emerge from that conflict." He won Pulitzers in 1968 for an account of the 1967 Vietnam War protest march on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night, and in 1979 for The Executioner's Song, a novel about self-confessed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer published dozens of novels (his latest, The Castle in the Forest, a fictionalised account of Hitler's childhood told by an underling of Satan's, came out this year), stories, essays, and newspaper articles, and he co-founded The Village Voice, an alternative newspaper in New York.
Obituaries and Remembrances:
- USA Today, the most interesting of the obits so far
- NYT (AP)
- BBC
- 2007 interview with Mailer at EW.com
Labels: american writer, author, deaths, mailer, norman mailer, novelist, obituary
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
An Appreciation of Crime Novelist Patricia Highsmith
By Maria Alvarez in the Telegraph:
"Highsmith's understanding of the unconscious and the irrational, coupled with her lucid prose and sophisticated mastery of suspense, are the reasons why many see her as having elevated crime fiction to an art form." ...
"She created unsympathetic protagonists: the seriously unhinged or the dully melancholic. Her endings are rarely predictable; the action is often a demented loop. Victims turn into stalkers, stalkers turn into victims, murders are botched, the eccentric can be harmless or insane. We are anxious because we have no way of knowing: the world is out of control."
Labels: crime fiction, fiction, highsmith, novelist, patricia highsmith
