Antidote To Wilde

[s~Z]

Politics and the Novel: A Symposium
http://www.calendarlive.com/books/lat_0813politics1.htm

"The books that were politically important for me, therefore, were the books
that indicated this broadly stated dissent--whether emotionally,
intellectually, formally, aesthetically--and they were books like "The
Crying of Lot 49" or "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon or "Naked Lunch"
by William S. Burroughs or "The Public Burning" by Robert Coover or
"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison or "Native Son" by Richard Wright. These
are all books that I first read in my teens and they were powerfully
formative of my own political development--in that they differed from and
resisted the United States of America as articulated by pollsters and
tabloids and mainstream party politics. These books are not politically
manifest in that they propose a conventional political alternative (Vote
Green! Throw the Bums Out!), but they are political in that they disagree
with the culture as it is--a rapacious culture, a narcissistic culture, an
unjust culture--and this articulation of dissent, indeed, was enough for me
to go on. Ellison and Pynchon and Burroughs and their ilk made me want to
get a senator and grab him by the lapels and give him an earful. This is
something I still would like to do."

    --Rick Moody

And A List of Recommended Political/Historical Novels:
 http://www.latimes.com/print/books/20000812/t000075695.html