Journalism

Jon Wiener: A lot of what you’ve written celebrates “the golden age of promiscuity” in 1970s New York. That seems at odds with the gay marriage movement today.
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Edmund White: First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, “It must be a good thing to fight for.” Now I have a confession to make: I got married in November to my friend Michael Carroll, whom I’ve been with for nineteen years. At least we didn’t rush into it.
… continued at http://www.thenation.com/article/179032/qa-edmund-white

Q. There have been something like 14 John Banville novels, books that go in the “literary fiction” section of the bookstore and that win the Man Booker Prize; and as Benjamin Black you have now written eight books, and they go into the “mystery” section. So we have high and low, art and craft, poetry and plot; is that an okay way to talk about Banville and Benjamin Black?
A. No. I hate it. I wish they didn’t do that. . . .
. . .continued at LA Review of Books, HERE

When Penguin Books announced on Feb. 11 that it would withdraw from India and pulp The Hindus: An Alternative History in response to a lawsuit claiming the book “has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus,” it was only the latest in a series of surrenders by distinguished publishers in the face of militant Hindu fundamentalism….
…more at TheNation.com HERE

JW: you’ve said there are disadvantages to the paperback.
RK: Yes, I said this softer edition is less useful for protecting yourself against the blows of an officer. I was kidding around, remembering the episodes at UC schools in California where people at demonstrations used books to protect themselves from riot police.
. . . continued at  The Nation, HERE.

November 15, 1969—“Vietnam Moratorium Day”—nearly half a million people gathered on the mall in Washington DC, to protest the war, and Pete Seeger was on the stage. “I guess I faced the biggest audience I’ve ever faced in my life,” he told me in an 1981 interview. “Hundreds of thousands, how many I don’t know. They stretched as far as the eye could see up the hillside and over the hill.”  The song he sang was “Give Peace a Chance” . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE.

RICHARD NIXON didn’t talk much about American writers. On the White House tapes, which recorded his conversations from February 1971 to July 1973, there’s no mention of Norman Mailer, John Updike, or Gore Vidal. There’s no mention of best-selling authors of the era like William Peter Blatty of The Exorcist or Frederick Forsyth of The Day of the Jackal. But Nixon did talk about Philip Roth.
NIXON: What if anything do you know about the Roth book?
HALDEMAN: Oh, a fair amount.
. . . continued at LA Review of Books, HERE.

JW: You spent your first seven years in the Soviet Union—what was your 7-year-old understanding of communism, of Lenin himself?

GS: Let’s start with Lenin. One of the biggest statues of Lenin was in Leningrad right outside our window. I loved Lenin so much that I would wake up every morning and hug his pedestal. When I was 5, I wrote a book called Lenin and His Magical Goose, in which Lenin and a talking goose conquer Finland and make it a socialist country. I very much wanted to become a soldier in the Red Army, or a cosmonaut. I wanted to try to launch an attack against the United States and make it safe for socialism.
– – – continued at The Nation, HERE.

Dick Cheney came to the Nixon Library this week to talk about his new book, Heart.  When our most hated vice president visits the library of our most disgraced president, you look forward to a good night. So my friend Howard and I went to Yorba Linda, expecting a festive evening of Obama-bashing and a twisted trip back through the glories of the Bush years. . . . .  continued at TheNation.com, HERE.

WHO KILLED JFK? Joe Kennedy did it — because the kid had gone liberal on him. It’s my favorite Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, and it’s presented in a wonderful novel, Winter Kills, by Richard Condon. Condon is best known as the author of The Manchurian Candidate . . .
. . . continued at the LA Review of Books, HERE.

I haven’t read all 1,000 JFK assassination books, but I do have five favorites: at TheNation.com:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/177118/five-best-kennedy-assassination-books