Thomas Mallon

NOW A SHOWTIME LIMITED SERIES STARRING MATT BOMER, JONATHAN BAILEY, AND ALLISON WILLIAMS A searing historical novel set in 1950s Washington, D.C.a world of dominated by personalities like Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe McCarthyand infused with political drama, unexpected humor, and heartbreak. From the acclaimed author of Watergate and Up With the Sun "Crisp, buoyant prose." The New York Times Book ReviewIn a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic, is eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tims first job and, after Fullers advances, his first love affair. As McCarthy mounts a desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on sexual subversives in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives while moving between the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATOs front line in Europe.

Washington D. C., principios de la década de los 50: un mundo de ideología pura, consumo de alcohol en exceso y expedientes secretos, dominado por personajes tan descomunales como Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta y Joe McCarthy. A esta ciudad agitada llega Timothy Laughlin, un hombre recien graduado de Fordham y un catolico devoto ansioso por unirse a la cruzada contra el comunismo. Un encuentro casual con Hawkins Fuller, un funcionario apuesto y despilfarrador del Departamento de Estado, lleva a Tim a conseguir su primer trabajo en Washington D. C. y, despues de las insinuaciones de Fuller, su primera historia de amor. Ahora, mientras McCarthy hace una apuesta cada vez mas desesperada por el poder y las investigaciones internas se centran en los subversivos sexuales en el gobierno, a Tim y a Fuller les resulta cada vez mas peligroso llevar esta doble vida. Atrapado en una voragine de engaños e intrigas, mientras se aferra a la amistad de una hermosa joven llamada Mary Johnson, Tim lucha por reconciliar sus convicciones politicas, su amor por Dios y su amor por Fuller un enredo que terminara en un acto de traicion sorprendente.Moviendose entre el edificio de oficinas del Senado y el Evening Star de Washington, entre el mundo diplomatico de Foggy Bottom y el frente de la OTAN en Europa, Fellow Travelers: rosa y lavanda es un libro con un intenso drama politico, un humor inesperado y una angustia genuina. Es la novela mas destacada y atrevida de Thomas Mallon hasta la fecha.

Set during the tumultuous middle of the George W. Bush yearsamid the twin catastrophes of the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane KatrinaLandfall brings Thomas Mallons cavalcade of contemporary American politics, which began with Watergate and continue with Finale, to a vivid and emotional climax.The president at the novels center possesses a personality whose high-speed alternations between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify the panoply of characters around him. They include his acerbic, crafty mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush; his desperately correct and eager-to-please secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice; the gnomic and manipulative Donald Rumsfeld; foreign leaders from Tony Blair to Vladimir Putin; and the caustic one-woman chorus of Ann Richards, Bushs predecessor as governor of Texas. A gallery of political and media figures, from the widowed Nancy Reagan to the philandering John Edwards to the brilliantly contrarian Christopher Hitchens, bring the novel and the era to life.The story is deepened and driven by a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison OConnor, whose destinies have been affixed to Bushs since they were teenagers in the 1970s. The true believer and the skeptic who end up exchanging ideological places in a romantic and political drama that unfolds in locations from New Orleans to Baghdad and during the parties, press conferences, and state funerals of Washington, D.C.

A delightful investigation of the art of letter writing, Yours Ever explores masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry. Here are Madame de Sévigné’s devas

From the acclaimed novelist (Henry and Clara, Two Moons), essayist (A Book of Ones Own), and critic (1998 National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing)an engaging new collection of essays.In Fact gathers the best of Thomas Mallons superb criticism from the past twenty-two yearsessays that appeared in his GQ column, "Doubting Thomas," and in The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and Harpers, among other publications. Here are his evaluations of the work of contemporary writers such as Nicholson Baker, Peter Carey, Tom Wolfe, Do DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Robert Stone, and reassessments of such earlier twentieth-century figures as John OHara, Sinclair Lewis, Truman Capote, and Mary McCarthy. Mallon also considers an array of odd literary genres and phenomenaincluding book indexes, obituaries, plagiarism, cancelled checks, fan mail, and author tours. And he turns his sharp eye on historical fiction (his own genre) as well as on the history, practice, and future of memoir.Smart, unorthodox, and impassioned, this collection is an integral piece of an important literary career and an altogether marvelous read.

From a writer whose last book, Henry and Clara, prompted John Updike to declare Thomas Mallon one of the most interesting American novelists at work, comes a story that perfectly captures the delightful romance and wistful magic of our recent, and more innocent, past.Thomas Mallon has masterfully appropriated a jubilant legend (and famous headline) of modern American history -- Harry Trumans upset victory over Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election -- and built around it a midwestern Midsummer Nights Dream. Set in Deweys hometown of Owosso, Michigan, this is the captivating story of a local love triangle that mirrors the national election contest. As the voters must decide between candidates, so must Anne Macmurray choose between two suitors: an ardent UAW organizer and his polar opposite, a wealthy lawyer whos certain he will ride to state Senate victory on Republican coattails.As they weave a small-town tapestry of dreams and secrets, the people of Owosso ready themselves for the fame that is bound to shower down upon them after Deweys "sure thing" victory. But as the novel -- and history -- move toward election night, we watch the citizens of Owosso, Anne Macmurray and her suitors in particular, await the outcome of the election and the rearrangement of their fates in a climax filled with suspense, chagrin, and unexpected joy.

A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-DispatchAdding to a fiction chronicle that has already spanned American history from the Lincoln assassination to the Watergate scandal, Thomas Mallon now brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president in modern times. Finale captures the crusading ideologies, blunders, and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Reagan years, taking readers to the political gridiron of Washington, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev. Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal-arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novels memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, Jr. (Reagans would-be assassin), and even Bette Davis, with whom the president had long ago appeared onscreen. Several figuresincluding a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan (on the verge of a terrible realization)become the eyes through which readers see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and a political revolution. At the center of it allbut forever out of reachis Ronald Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him. Finale is the book that Thomas Mallons work has been building toward for years. It is the most entertaining and panoramic novel about American politics since Advise and Consent, more than a half century ago.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPRS BOOKS WE LOVE From the renowned novelist and critic, an exquisite collection of journal entries from the 1980s and 90s, tracking a young, gay authors literary coming-of-age in New York during the AIDS crisisIn 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex.Though he didnt know it, everything would soon change for Mallon. Riding the success of his debut, A Book of Ones Own, he became a fixture within the citys literary scene, crossing paths with cultural giants and becoming an editor at GQ. He captured it all in his daily journals. But in some ways it was the worst possible time for a gay coming-of-age in the city. One of his lovers succumbed to AIDS, and the illness of others was both a heartbreaking reality and a constant reminder of his own exposure.Tracing his own life day by day, Mallon evokes all that those years encompassed: the hookups, intensifying politics, personal tragedies, as well as his own blossoming success and eventual romantic happiness. The Very Heart of It is a brilliant and bewitching look into the daily life of one of our most important literary figures, and a keepsake from a bygone era.

Nearly forty years have passed since Ruth Hyde Paine, a Quaker housewife in suburban Dallas, offered shelter and assistance to a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. For nine months in 1963, Mrs. Paine was so deeply involved in the Oswalds lives that she eventually became one of the Warren Commissions most important witnesses.Mrs. Paines Garage is the tragic story of a well-intentioned woman who found Oswald the job that put him six floors above Dealey Plazainto which, on November 22, he fired a rifle hed kept hidden inside Mrs. Paines house. But this is also a tale of survival and resiliency: the story of a devout, open-hearted woman who weathered a whirlwind of investigation, suspicion, and betrayal, and who refused to allow her enmeshment in the calamity of that November to crush her own life. Thomas Mallon gives us a disturbing account of generosity and secrets, of suppressed memories and tragic might-have-beens, of coincidences more eerie than conspiracy theory. His book is unlike any other work that has been published on the murder of President Kennedy.

From one of our most esteemed historical novelists, a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators. For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generateduncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirsit falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandals greatest mysteries (who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?) and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now, moving readers from the private cabins of Camp David to the klieg lights of the Senate Caucus Room, from the District of Columbia jail to the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelts sharp-tongued ninety-year-old daughter (The clock is dick-dick-dicking), and into the hive of the Watergate complex itself, home not only to the Democratic National Committee but also to the presidents attorney general, his recklessly loyal secretary, and the shadowy man from Mississippi who pays out hush money to the burglars. Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his splendid evocation of Washington, Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy that surpasses even what he attained in his previous novels, as he turns a third-rate burglary into a tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.

From the beloved author of Fellow Travelers and the "master of the historical novel" (Newsweek), a soulful, engrossing novel about a space-obsessed grade-schooler who skips class to follow the flight of the Aurora 7 mission.This acclaimed novel vividly tells the story of a single day in MayMay 24, 1962. While astronaut Scott Carpenter orbits the earth in his Aurora 7 capsule, the lives of a host of characters seem interwoven on the ground beloweveryone from a convicted killer to a famous novelist, a New York cabdriver, a conflicted priest, and a British housewife preparing to give birth to a thalidomide-stricken baby. Above all, Aurora 7 tells the story of Gregory Noonan, a spooky suburban fifth-grader obsessed with the space program. The fate of Gregory and his family will prove mysteriously linked to the astronauts when the boy flees school to watch the perilous climax of Carpenters mission on the giant TV monitors in Grand Central Terminal. With cameos by Walter Cronkite, John F. Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald, Aurora 7 is a dazzling, "gift-wrapped time capsule" (New Yorker) of a novel.

A literary tour through the notable diaries of history, giving us a window into the private lives of the famous and infamous, with a new introduction by the authorBefore the age of social media, chronicling ones life was a private matter. In this literary tour through the notable diaries of history, Thomas Mallon is a witty guide to the personal journals of the famous and infamous, bringing to life their neuroses, artistic practices, and preoccupations. Virginia Woolf casts her sharp eye on friends and acquaintances. Samuel Pepys chronicles political life in Restoration England. Sylvia Plaths notebooks are filled with images she will turn into poems. F. Scott Fitzgerald records overheard conversation while Leonardo da Vinci scribbles down his dreams. Anais Nin treats her diary as a tell-all, reflecting on love, sex, and death across several volumes and decades.In A Book of Ones Own, Mallon is a sympathetic, stylish, and insightful companion, transporting us across eras and continents with infectious joie de vivre. Here is a profound and compelling case for the diary as the quintessential literary art form, an act of defiance against being forgotten, and a stab at immortality.

From the author of Henry and Clara, a dazzling, hilarious novel that captures the heart and soul of New York in the Jazz Age.Bandbox is a hugely successful magazine, a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder. Edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat Joe Harris, the magazine has a masthead that includes, among many others, a grisly, alliterative crime writer; a shy but murderously determined copyboy; and a burned-out vaudeville correspondent whos lovesick for his loyal, dewy assistant.As the novel opens, the defection of Harriss most ambitious protege has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But theres more to come: a sabotaged fiction contest, the NYPD vice squad, a subscribers kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Fosses Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the novel races from skyscraper to speakeasy, hops a luxury train to Hollywood, and crashes a buttoned-down dinner with Calvin Coolidge.Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap and poignant book that brilliantly portrays the gaudiest American decade of them all.

Astronomy, politics, and romance join forces in this novel from the writer John Updike has called "one of the most interesting American novelists at work." Its the spring of 1877 in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Hugh Allison has conceived a secret ambition: to project an image through time and space. But his plan takes on urgent life only when the mathematically gifted Cynthia May enters his orbit as one of the observatorys human "computers." A Civil War widow whose beauty has been shadowed by worry and poverty, Cynthia reluctantly falls in love with the younger Hugh, who missed the war that has haunted her life. But the fate of their love affair -- and of Hughs heavenly vision -- may be out of their hands, decided instead by an astrologer and by the actions of a dangerously magnetic politician who wields his power over a Senate convulsed by Reconstruction and a wildly disputed presidential election.Masterfully combining historical detail and startling invention, Thomas Mallon gives us a galvanizing story of earthly heartbreak and otherworldly triumph.

A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Through the curious life of Dick Kallmana real-life celebrity striver, poisonously charming actor, and eventual murder victimthe unforgiving worlds of postwar showbiz and down-low gay sexuality are thrown into stark relief in this page-turning blast (James Ellroy, author of Widespread Panic)"Engrossing[A] keen portrait of 1980s New Yorka pensive, often gorgeous depiction ofgay life in Manhattan before Stonewall and life on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic." The Washington PostDick Kallman was an up-and-coming actor in the fifties and sixtiesuntil he wasnt. A costar on Broadway, a member of Lucille Balls historic Desilu workshop, and finally a primetime TV actor, Dick had hustled to get his big break. But just as soon as his star began to rise, his roles began to dry up and he faded from the spotlight, his name out of tabloids and newspapers until his sensational murder in 1980.Through the eyes of his occasional pianist and longtime acquaintance Matt Liannetto, a tenderhearted but wry observer often on the fringes of Broadways big moments, Kallmans life and death come into appallingly sharp focus. The actors yearslong, unrequited love for a fellow performer brings out a competitive, vindictive edge in him. Whenever a new door opens, Kallman rushes unwittingly to close it. Even as he walks over other people, he can never get out of his own way.As Matt pores over the life of this handsome could-have-been, Up With the Sun re-creates the brassy, sometimes brutal world that shaped Kallman, capturing his collisions with not only Lucille Ball, but an array of stars from Sophie Tucker to Judy Garland and Johnny Carson. Part crime story, part showbiz history, and part love story, this is a crackling novel about personal demons and dangerously suppressed passions that spans thirty years of gay lifethe whole tumultuous era from the Kinsey Report through Stonewall and, finally, AIDS.

On the evening of Good Friday, 1865, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris joined the Lincolns in the Presidential box at Fords Theater, becoming eyewitnesses to one of the great tragedies of American history. In this riveting novel, Thomas Mallon re-creates the unusual love story of this young engaged couple whose fateful encounter with history profoundly affects the remainder of their lives. Lincolns assassination is only one part of the remarkable life they share, a dramatic tale of passion, scandal, heroism, murder, and madness, all based on Mallons deep research into the fascinating history of the Rathbone and Harris families. Henry and Clara not only tells the astonishing story of its title figures; it also illuminates the culture of nineteenth-century Victorian America: a rigid society barely concealing the suppressed impulses and undercurrents that only grew stronger as the century progressed.