in his 1979 masterpiece, The Executioner's Song), but instead clumsily tries to force his material into an unyielding cookie-cutter shape. The result is a book that succeeds simultaneously in being boring and presumptuous, derivative and solipsistic." She also wrote: "Mr. Mailer willfully veers even further into the realm of imaginative fancy than Don DeLillo did in his powerful 1988 Oswald novel Libra." Also writing for the New York Times, Thomas Powers described the work as "marvelous". Powers writes, "All of this is described wonderfully well. Mailer's account adds many new characters and incidents to the story told by Ms. McMillan, but it is also distinguished by a brilliant linguistic invention, a kind of Mailer-patent Russian-English that captures Russian rhythms not only of language but also of thinking and feeling about love, work and the ways of the world." References External links Booknotes interview with Mailer on Oswald's Tale, June 25, 1995. 1995 non-fiction books Non-fiction books about the assassination of John F. Kennedy Non-fiction books by Norman Mailer Random House books