Bibliographical Description
87.07.W036: Vidal – Myra Breckinridge / Myron
MYRA | BRECKINRIDGE | [decorative rule 89 mm] | MYRON | BY | GORE VIDAL | Vintage Contemporaries [rule 12 mm] | Vintage Books [rule 45 mm] | A Division of Random House | New York [rule 62 mm]
214 leaves, pp. i–vi vii-x 1–2 3-213 214–216 217-417 [5]
First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, July 1987
Contents: i author photo and blurbs, ii ‘BOOKS BY GORE VIDAL’, iii half-title, iv blank, v title, vi imprint, vii-x ‘INTRODUCTION’, 1 divisional title ‘MYRA | BRECKINRIDGE | [decorative rule 89 mm]’, 2 blank [with running title ‘MYRA BRECKINRIDGE’], 3-213 Myra Breckinridge, 214 blank, 215 divisional title ‘MYRON | [decorative rule 89 mm]’, 216 blank [with running title ‘MYRON’], 217-417 Myron, χ1b blank, χ2a-χ2b about the author, χ3a Vintage Contemporaries order sheet, χ3b Vintage Contemporaries list.
Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Chris Moore; interior author photo by Look magazine.
Copyright: © 1968, 1974, 1986. ISBN: 0-394-75444-1. Price: $8.95. Myra Breckinridge was first published by Little, Brown & Co. 1968; Myron was first published by Random House 1974; the collected edition of Myra Breckinridge and Myron was first published by Random House 1986.
Copies: JDP 1.1
Blurbs
- (front cover) A comic masterpiece. – Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review
- Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (chosen by the British Book Marketing Council as one of the 20 best novels of the last 50 years) and Myron now appear together for the first time in paperback, with a new preface by the author.
- After many readings, Myra Breckinridge continues to give wicked pleasure, and still seems to have fixed the limit beyond which the most advanced aesthetic neo-pornography ever can go…The polemic of Myra remains the best embodiment of Vidal’s most useful insistence as a moralist, which is that we ought to cease speaking of homosexuals and heterosexuals. There are only women and men, some of whom prefer their own sex, some the other, and some both. This is the burden of Myra Breckinridge, but a burden borne with lightness, wildness, abandon, joy, skill. – Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books
- Has literary decency fallen so low? – Time
- Vidal’s development is crowned with great success, not only for the density of comic effects, but because this book holds its own built-in theory, that which the author calls his ‘après-post-structuralism.’ I consider Vidal to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or the cube. – Italo Calvino, La Repubblica (Rome)