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Vidal's nonfiction has been more popular in Italy than anywhere else in
the world, perhaps because he has lived there for so long. A 2003 essay
collection published in Italy has a dapper Vidal falling off the right
edge of the cover. Below left is an Italian collection of essays issued
under the title "The End of the Empire," featuring a sculpture of a
cigarette butt on its cover, and beginning with an essay by the book's
translator that calls Vidal "one window on America." Vidal's little memoir
Screening History became the Italian "Remotely on This Screen."
The cover - with its layers of imagery - shows Vidal seated in a movie
theater, while on the screen behind him is a scene from the TV movie
Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid in which Vidal can be seen in costume
as a preacher (it was a cameo role). The German edition of this
book (center row above, at left) features a photo of Vidal's father in
front of an airplane, and it's been retitled "America's Dream of
Flight." Vidal's Views from a Window:
Conversations with Gore Vidal is an ingenious little book that
collects material from many Vidal essays and puts them together by topic
in a sort of running dialogue with multiple interviewers. The French
retitled the book "Artists and Barbarians," while the Spanish simply
called it "Conversations with Gore Vidal." Finally, in 2002, an academic
publisher issued the essay collection The Last Empire in a
Spanish edition that included Vidal's highly controversial essay on the
Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. There also is a
Turkish edition of the book (above), the first publication of Vidal's
essays in Turkey, where his novels are often translated.
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Go to The Gore Vidal Index