His most recent work, The Golden Age (Random House) is the concluding volume in Gore Vidal's celebrated and bestselling American empire novels-a unique pageant of the national experience from the United States' entry into World War Two to the end of the Korean War. In his six previous narratives of the American empire-Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.-he has created a fictional portrait of our nation from its founding.

Hear Gore Vidal read from The Golden Age in this Bold Type recording.

From "The Golden Age" ) 2000, Gore Vidal. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. No reproduction of this material is authorized without the express written consent of the Licensor.

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Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

This is one of those great world novels that Americans keep trying to write on the grounds that "Finnegans Wake" is bound to wear out or, worse, be read. We have had no luck with this sort of book. But then our national genius is for the short story and the novella. Mann dramatized the nature of the demonic in our affairs and how, like the spirochete, a disease like Nazism can permeate the body politic just as, in Mann's genius-protagonist, syphilis proves to be a malignant source of his genius as well as of his destruction. Powerful metaphor, great novel.

Good as Gold by Joseph Heller

I suppose because Heller is a superb comic novelist with an eye and ear for American idiocies that he's never included on lists of novelists to be venerated. ("Catch-22" went into the language before it got onto the syllabus.) Here he is at his deadly best, illuminating a hustler on the make in politics. Can it possibly be Dr. Henry Kissinger?

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