91.26

Harlot's Ghost. New York: Random House, 2 October. London: Michael Joseph, late October; Novel, 1310 pp., $30.

Dedication: "To Jason Epstein". Rpt: Advance excerpts appeared in Esquire (88.5), Playboy (88.11), Story (89.10), Rolling Stone (91.4–91.6), Paris Review (91.8), Partisan Review (91.9), New York (91.11), New York Review of Books (91.13), New York Times Book Review (91.16); 16 separate excerpts, more than from any other work, are reprinted in The Time of Our Time (98.7). See 76.9, 91.27, 91.48, other 1991 entries, 92.5, 98.9.

Mailer:

“ There is a very unspoken drama in the CIA. Obviously no one is ever going to write about indiscretion in the ranks; they will feel it within the ranks, but it’s never going to get out if they can help it. I’ve always been amused by CIA novels that have this absolute immaculate secrecy governing operations. Maybe there’s one traitor, but he’s absolutely uncharacteristic of the whole. But it seems to me that the way these things really work is with the mixture of high secrecy and violations of that secrecy. (91.17) ”

• 

Bibliography

Reviews

• Burgess, Anthony (September 29, 1991). "A Secret History of Our Time". Washington Post Book World. pp. 1, 10. Positive.
• Caldwell, Gsil (October 6, 1991). "A Monumental Epic in Mailer Style". Boston Globe. p. A15. Mixed.
• Hitchens, Christopher (November 7, 1991). "On the Imagining of Conspiracy". London Review of Books. pp. 6–9. Positive.
• Hunt, E. Howard (November 1991). "Hocus Bogus". GQ. pp. 244, 246–247, 304–305. Mixed.
• Kazin, Alfred (1992). "Mailer's Romance with the CIA". Dissent. 39 (spring): 278–2280. Negative.
• Koenig, Rhoda (October 7, 1991). "Devil's Party". New York. pp. 108–109. Positive.
• Menand, Louis (November 4, 1991). "From Here to Eternity". New Yorker. pp. 114–119. Negative.
• Pritchard, William H. (1992). "Mailer's Main Event". Hudson Review. 45 (spring): 149–157. Positive.
• Rushdie, Salman (October 20, 1991). "God Squad Versus the King Brothers". Independent on Sunday. London. Positive.
• Sheed, Wilfred (December 5, 1991). "Armageddon Now?". New York Review of Books. pp. 41–48. Positive.
• Simon, John (September 29, 1991). "The Company They Keep". New York Times Book Review. pp. 1, 24–26. Negative. See 91.48.

Essays

• Glenday, Michael K. (1995). Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 130–143.
• McDonald, Brian J. "Spooks and Agencies: Harlot's Ghost and the Culture of Secrecy". In Whalen-Bridge, John. Norman Mailer's Later Fictions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 123–138.
• Hicks, Alex (2014). "Harlot's Anatomy". Mailer Review. 8: 215–221.
• Leeds, Barry (2001). "Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost: Yet another Big Book". Canadian Review of American Studies. 31 (fall): 159–167. Rpt: In Leeds (2002).
• Rampton, David (2006). "Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer's Harlot's Ghost". Journal of Modern Literature. 30 (fall): 46–63.
• Wilson, Andrew (2008). "Harlot's Ghost: Factions". Norman Mailer: An American Aesthetic. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. pp. 233–256. ISBN 9783039114061.
• Whalen-Bridge, John. "Adamic Purity as Double-Agent in Harlot's Ghost". Political Fiction and the American Self. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. 103–130. ISBN 9780252066887.