Conversations With Tom Wolfe

Download or read book Conversations with Tom Wolfe written by Dorothy McInnis Scura and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1990 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary journalist, ""lowly social historian,"" ""chronicler of his times,"" and ""champion of realism"" are among the many epithets heaped upon Tom Wolfe by himself and his myriad admirers and critics. In this collection of interviews spanning his richly productive career, Wolfe is seen as a writer imitating no one and riding the crest of each latest wave in contemporary America. For more than a quarter of a century he has been the vivid and varied chronicler of our time--from the Californian car customizers and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters of the sixties to the ambition-driven inhabitants of New York City in the eighties. His hybrid of reporting and fiction-writing has received perhaps more applause than any other literary journalism, and his first major work of fiction, Bonfire of the Vanities, rested at the top of the bestseller lists for more than a year. Here is Tom Wolfe talking--about the subjects of his eight books, about the writers he admires, about the discipline of writing, about his politics and his disposition to satire and parody. As he explains his attempt ""to show the world 'life in our times,'"" this collection of delightfully witty and informative interviews reveals the insights and the intellect of one of America's brightest and most appealing authors.

Download or read book Back to Blood written by Tom Wolfe and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay -- with officer Nestor Camacho on board -- Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

Download or read book The Right Stuff written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar Award-winning film of the same name and the 8-part Disney+ TV mini-series. From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. " Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.

Download or read book A Man in Full written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

Download or read book The Purple Decades written by Tom Wolfe and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1982-10 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of Wolfe's essays, articles, and chapters from previous collections is filled with observations on U.S. popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

Download or read book Hooking Up written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the Year 2000 we can forget about necking. Today's girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is being introduced by name. And how rarely our hooked-up boys and girls are introduced by name!-as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls' File-o-Fax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up's displays of his famed reporting prowess. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers... to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new field of genetics and neuroscience. . . to the inner workings of television's magazine-show sting operations. Printed here in its entirety is "Ambush at Fort Bragg," a novella about sting TV in which Wolfe prefigured with eerie accuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that would soon explode in the press. A second piece of fiction, "U. R. Here," the story of a New York artist who triumphs precisely because of his total lack of talent, gives us a case history preparing us for Wolfe's forecast ("My Three Stooges," "The Invisible Artist") of radical changes about to sweep the arts in America. As an espresso after so much full-bodied twenty-first-century fare, we get a trip to Memory Mall. Reprinted here for the first time are Wolfe's two articles about The New Yorker magazine and its editor, William Shawn, which ignited one of the great firestorms of twentieth-century journalism. Wolfe's afterword about it all is in itself a delicious draught of an intoxicating era, the Twistin' Sixties. In sum, here is Tom Wolfe at the height of his powers as reporter, novelist, sociologist, memoirist, and-to paraphrase what Balzac called himself-the very secretary of American society in the 21st century.

Download or read book The Kingdom of Speech written by Tom Wolfe and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A great journalist with a whip-like satirical prose style... Wolfe’s great gift is to make the heavy seem light and this book is such an entertaining polemic that I read it in a day and immediately wanted to read it again.' - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey through language. The Kingdom of Speech is a paradigm-shifting argument that speech - not evolution - is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in our Kingdom of Speech.