Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It’s startling, fifty years on, to look back at the work of Mailer and others in the 1960s—from The Presidential Papers to The Armies of the Night—and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the republic from itself and […]

The last major story that D.H. Lawrence published, six months before his death, was set in the ancient world and, characteristically, preoccupied with resurrection. “The Man Who Died” is a typically wild and visionary piece, sensual and impenitent, about the risen Jesus meeting a priestess of Isis and, true to his Chatterley origins, feeling that […]

“Then northward with the spring into Kashmir,” begins a paragraph in the book you are holding in your hand, “past valley after lovely valley, shepherds and their flocks moving across the greenery in the day, men squatting by their hillside fires in the night. Soft-lipped boys with enormous turbans shrieking at us from their dark […]

In all the stories, California is the point of arrival, the place to which everyone aspires: the end of the line, as more sardonic souls might put it, or at the very least, in Don Henley’s agile pun, the “last resort.” It is the place where dreams and dreamers culminate (which is another way of […]

Growing up within the tightly guarded confines of a fifteenth-century English boarding school, my friends and I took as our tokens of accomplishment the somewhat recherche gray volumes known as Penguin Modern Classics. When I was in college, in the midseventies, Picador books would become the rage (Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Richard Brautigan–outlaw American energy […]