"A small treasure of a book...It deserves a wide audience of Mailer and
Vidal fans" - Dick Cavett.
He prepared therefore for the meditative journey that proves most
excruciating in Limbo, a rounding through the past, a trip back! It is a
venture full of perils. To meditate on TV might prove equal to writing a
recollection of an enemy one has never met and cannot quite believe in.
Indeed, how to conceive of an enemy who is without personal animosity?
It was like writing a memoir of an oxymoron. Limbo set its tasks.
More a short book than an essay, Of a Small and Modest Malignancy,
Wicked and Bristling with Dots is Norman Mailer's scathing and often
brilliant take-down of television culture, penned for Esquire in the
wake of Mailer's infamous altercation with Gore Vidal on The Dick
Cavett Show.
Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots was
originally published in Esquire, November 1977. Cover design by Adil
Dara.