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Thomas Mallon
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Aurora 7by Thomas MallonISBN 0156011425 (0-15-601142-5)
Softcover, Harvest Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Aurora 7'Book summary:In this delightful, highly charged novel, Mallon re-creates a single day--Thursday, May 24, 1962, the day Scott Carpenter made the historic Aurora 7 voyage. But Mallon adds a twist: a space-crazed 11-year-old, Gregory Noonan, goes on the voyage with Carpenter--in spirit. [via]
Bandboxby Thomas MallonISBN 0156029979 (0-15-602997-9)
Softcover, Harcourt
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Book of One's Own: People and Their Diariesby Thomas MallonISBN 0330291327 (0-330-29132-7)
Softcover, Pan Macmillan
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Dewey Defeats Truman: A Novelby Thomas MallonISBN 0312180861 (0-312-18086-1)
Softcover, Picador
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dewey Defeats Truman: A Novel'Book summary:Despite what the title might imply, this isn't speculative fiction about what would have happened if Thomas Dewey had defeated Harry Truman in 1948. Rather, it's a gently comic novel set in Dewey's home town of Owosso, Michigan, in the period between his presidential nomination in June 1948 and his stunning defeat that November. The town's mania for its native son serves as a framework for the book's story, which centers on a love triangle among Peter Cox, a dashing, up-and-coming young Republican; Jack Riley, a disheveled Democratic union organizer; and Anne Macmurray, a fetching bookstore clerk and would-be novelist. They and other deftly drawn Owossoans move briskly through a plot that smoothly interweaves public and private events. The book is flavored with nostalgia for what the author has called an era with "a lack of sourness." [via]
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Dubin's Livesby Thomas MallonISBN 0374528829 (0-374-52882-9)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Fellow Travelersby Thomas MallonISBN 0307388905 (0-307-38890-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Henry and Claraby Thomas MallonISBN 0312135084 (0-312-13508-4)
Softcover, Picador USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Henry and Clara'Book summary:Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were engaged to be married, when they were invited to share the Presidential box with the Lincolns at Ford's Theater on the evening of Good Friday, 1865. When John Wilkes Booth crept into the box, the young couple became witnesses to a central tragedy in American history.[via]
But Lincoln's assassination is only one part of this novel--for in researching the lives of Henry and Clara Rathbone, Mallon uncovered an even more dramatic story of passion, scandal, heroism, murder, and madness. Imaginatively re-creating their lives, he tells the larger story of nineteenth-century Victorian America: a society structured above suppressed impulses and undercurrents that grew stronger as the century progressed. -
In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writingby Thomas MallonISBN 0375409165 (0-375-40916-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing'Book summary:Every profession is rich in what might be called marginalia: odd rituals, freakish human behaviors, and accidental blessings. In his second essay collection, Thomas Mallon admits to his love of the incidental in his own trade: "I have always been drawn to literature's suburbs." No wonder In Fact includes pieces on fan mail, obituaries, indexing, handwriting, the book tour, and plagiarism. Yet Mallon has more than marginal points to make. In his rumination on plagiarism, he discusses the frustrations of a poet who's had his work pilfered, and concludes: "In these times when there are fewer and fewer ways to be unlike everyone else--writing, with its fingerprint uniqueness, its irreducibility, may be more precious than ever to those who produce it."
This sense of the "fingerprint uniqueness" of writing infuses the entire book. Having fled academe to become a novelist (Dewey Defeats Truman , Henry and Clara, Two Moons), Mallon wrote the "Doubting Thomas" book column in GQ for a decade. A clutch of his reviews are collected here, and his critical writing has a feeling of urgency: this guy believes books matter. His passions are most evident (and most entertaining) when he's writing about books he doesn't like. His review of David Guterson's East of the Mountains, for example, contains this felicitous reference to the same author's bestselling debut, Snow Falling on Cedars: "Let us start by trying to divine the appeal of the by now ubiquitous Cedars." The sentence possesses the refined disgust of someone holding a dead mouse between forefinger and thumb. Elsewhere Mallon takes on DeLillo, Wolfe, and Vidal, along with such past masters as H.L. Mencken, Siegfried Sassoon, and John Kennedy Toole. One caveat: Most of these essays were written for a magazine with the word gentleman right in its title, and women get short shrift here. Mary McCarthy--"an object of youthful admiration, then a critical subject, and eventually a friend"--makes several appearances, and Jane Smiley receives an enthusiastic notice. Otherwise, this is Boy's Town. --Claire Dederer [via]
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Main Streetby Thomas MallonISBN 0451526821 (0-451-52682-1)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Main Street'Book summary:"Main Street" tells the tale of a big-city girl who marries a physician and settles in a small town in the Midwest, only to fall victim to the narrow-mindedness and unimaginative natures of the town's residents. Introduction by Thomas Mallon. [via]
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Mrs. Paine's Garage : And the Murder of John F. Kennedyby Thomas MallonISBN 0156027550 (0-15-602755-0)
Softcover, Harvest Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy'Book summary:Ruth Paine befriended Marina Oswald and found Marina's husband, Lee Harvey, a job in the Texas State Book Depository. Thomas Mallon's Mrs. Paine's Garagerevisits the brief intersection of these three lives--what he calls a "collision of innocent intentions and unforeseen enormities." Mallon details the nine-month Paine/Oswald friendship and its rapid post-assassination disintegration. He then sketches Paine's life since (from her testimony before various congressional committees to her current low-profile residence in Florida) and summarizes Paine's place in the churning, obsessive world of conspiracy theorists with snippets of humor. (Former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison is "Elmer Gantry with subpoena power.") This extended footnote to a footnote to a tragedy, though losing focus and energy by its end, is brisk, revelatory and even-handed. It also handily dispels several seemingly ominous coincidences about the events of November 22, 1963. --H. O'Billovitch [via]
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Rockets and Rodeosby Thomas MallonISBN 0517154064 (0-517-15406-4)
Hardcover, Random House Value Publishing
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Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectaclesby Thomas MallonISBN 0788152114 (0-7881-5211-4)
Hardcover, Diane Pub Co
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Stolen Wordsby Thomas MallonISBN 0156011360 (0-15-601136-0)
Softcover, Harvest Books
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Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarismby Thomas MallonISBN 0140144404 (0-14-014440-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Two Moonsby Thomas MallonISBN 0156010828 (0-15-601082-8)
Softcover, Harcourt
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Two Moons'Book summary:History may be written by the victors, but the finest historical fiction can explore a more varied--and often more vivid--constellation of characters and truths. In his lustrous fifth novel, Thomas Mallon brings some real figures to complex life and creates several others who are so brilliantly present it's hard to believe they have no past. Set in the late 1870s in Washington, D.C., a welter of aspiration, instability, and malaria, Two Moons is as taut with energy and anticipation as its four main players. When the novel opens, 35-year-old Cynthia May is determined to escape her typing job at the Interior Department and become a human "computer" at the Naval Observatory. For much of her life, she has had little to calculate but her considerable losses: both her twin brother and her husband were lost to the war, and her daughter was lost to diphtheria. But things are about to change. When she sits for the required exam, Cynthia handily thrashes the competition. "She set about filling in the table, sprinkling the numbers like raisins into a cupcake tin." Like his contemporary Andrea Barrett, to whom the book is dedicated, Mallon artfully draws us into the powers and pleasures of science:
Her columns grew longer, and if she squinted at them, the confetti of inklings began to resemble a skyful of stars. She had time to let her mind wander. The Magi's search for Bethlehem; the music of Milton's crystal spheres; the prognostications of the D Street astrologer in whose parlor Cynthia had lately spent a dollar she could not afford: they could all be reduced to these numbers. There was actually no need to squint and pretend that the digits were the stars. They were, by themselves, wildly alive, fact and symbol of the vast, cool distances in which one located the light of different worlds.
Mallon is also wildly alive to his characters' emotions. Cynthia would very much like Hugh Allison, the handsome antic astronomer in charge of the exam, to pick her professionally and personally. With both goals in mind, she heads straight for her neighborhood astrologer. But Mary Costello, who has less of a head for the stars than for survival, is expecting an important senator. If all goes well, the charming charlatan can keep this VIP in her pseudo-planetary sphere for some time. It is Cynthia, though, who lets "the War God" in--and instantly holds as much attraction for him as Hugh does for her: "Roscoe Conkling--who had spent an active amatory life hoping never to be surprised by a second woman in any room where he had arranged to meet but one--drew back, though only for a moment."And this is only the beginning. Over the course of his supple novel, Mallon teases out the agitations of love, power, and discovery. Cynthia, Hugh, Mary, and Conkling are each searching for different versions of "the choicest blessings of heaven." Of the four, Hugh's feverish aspiration may be the most tantalizing--even if his "immortal yearnings" cost him his career and life. Mallon is an artist of the intimate moment (witness the novel's heartbreaking coda), and in his hands Hugh and Cynthia are the very opposite of dull, sublunary lovers. In addition, as he has already displayed in Dewey Defeats Truman and Henry and Clara, the author is equally intrigued by political intrigue, and remakes Conkling in all his ambition, absurdity, and considerable threat. For Cynthia, the senator may be "a comet of highly doubtful periodicity," but her sharp-judging creator knows his reach is long and violent.
Two Moons is as lucid and mysterious as the stars some of its scientifics seek night after night. With his present dream of several past dreams, Thomas Mallon gathers his characters into the artifice of eternity. --Kerry Fried [via]
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