Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling With Dots
1980
First Published
3.52
Average Rating
88
Number of Pages
“A small treasure of a book…It deserves a wide audience of Mailer and Vidal fans”—Dick CavettHe prepared therefore for the meditative journey that proves most excruciating in Limbo, a rounding through the past, a trip back! It is a venture full of perils. To meditate on TV might prove equal to writing a recollection of an enemy one has never met and cannot quite believe in. Indeed, how to conceive of an enemy who is without personal animosity? It was like writing a memoir of an oxymoron. Limbo set its tasks.More a short book than an essay, Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling With Dots is Norman Mailer’s scathing and often brilliant take-down of television culture, penned for Esquire in the wake of Mailer’s infamous altercation with Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show.Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling With Dots was originally published in Esquire, November 1977. Cover design by Adil Dara.
Avg Rating
3.52
Number of Ratings
33
5 STARS
18%
4 STARS
36%
3 STARS
33%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
9%
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Author
Norman Mailer
Author · 42 books
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
