Deadfest of Champions

Bestdeathpoolever is no stranger to stories about postmortem wage earning, but this royal rumble is about more than just money. Within the past year, three of the most famous contemporary American authors, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Styron, have died. If sales are to be the referee of this match, then one of them is getting declared World Champion:

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of industry sales, Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" has sold about 280,000 copies since 2006, more than four times the combined pace of six of the most talked about books of the past 60 years: Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead," "The Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song," and Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner," "Sophie's Choice" and "Darkness Visible."

So that's it, Vonnegut wins. Of course, Vonnegut would probably object to being included in this granfalloon.

Ooh, I may have just killed this post. So it goes.

[Yahoo! News]

Mailer, Voice of the 60's, Silenced

We're sorry to see Norman Mailer go. From what we read about him, we think we'd like to have met him. Just not at a dinner party.

Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times in which he lived. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed in her memoir how close she had come to dying.

Mailer's first book, "The Naked and the Dead," was published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris. He passed nearly 60 years later in a hospital gown at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

[AP]