An evening at the Grahams

Earlier this summer, Nantucket residents Stephen and Cathy Graham opened their home to Bookmark guests for a discussion of Thomas Mallon's novel Fellow Travelers. The event was a smashing success.

Listen to what some of the guests had to say here.

From the pages of The Atlantic: Thomas Mallon on the mystery surrounding the Kennedy assassination

A Single Bullet Thomas Mallon talks about JFK conspiracy theories and a new book that places the blame squarely on Lee Harvey Oswald.

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot dead. The president was assassinated by the vice president, the KGB, the Mafia, the Cubans, or the Secret Service, depending on who one asks. According to the federal Warren Commission, however, the lone gunman was a 24-year-old radical amed Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

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From the pages of The Atlantic: Thomas Mallon on his novel Bandbox

Jazz, Flappers, and Magazines (an interview) Thomas Mallon talks about his new novel "Bandbox"--a madcap caper through the zany publishing world of 1920s New York.

The year is 1928, and a once "sclerotic" men's fashion magazine called Bandbox is in the throes of an unexpected renaissance. At the top of the masthead sits the colossal figure of Jehoshaphat "Joe" Harris, a headstrong, explosive personality whose recent success with Bandbox has brought glory to a waning career. But everything he has achieved could be in jeopardy: his star editor, Jimmy Gordon, has decamped to a rival publication and is doing his utmost to run his old boss out of town. As Harris tries to hang on to his hard-won subscribers and precious ad pages, all kinds of adventures ensue.

 

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Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon

Deemed “one of the most interesting American novelists at work” by John Updike, Thomas Mallon has for many years fused history and fiction in entertaining and provocative ways. In Fellow Travelers, set in Washington, D.C., at the height of the McCarthy era, he unspools a yarn that intertwines the Red Menace and the Lavender Scare. The affair between a debonair, WASPy State Department officer and an earnest young Senate aide—both closeted gay men—plays out against the government’s dogged effort to purge homosexuals from its ranks. Mallon weaves McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, the young protagonist’s struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with his Catholicism, and the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the Cold War into a dense tapestry of events and ideas. Despite the darker overtones of the anti-gay and anti-Communist witch hunts, Fellow Travelers conveys a buoyant patriotic spirit—and the book provides an occasion for discussion about freedom, sexual identity, and the American Idea amidst the tensions of the Cold War.