Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons

I will be sitting with Cullen Thomas at the Korea Society on Thursday November 29th, for a conversation on his book and Korean history, politics, and culture.

In 1993, Cullen Thomas was a young man who wanted to see the world and South Korea was one of his first stops. Convicted of smuggling hashish and sentenced to 3 ½ years in Korean prison, the world he ended up seeing—one in which the Confucian customs of Korean society take on a harsh character—wasn’t the one he expected. Reading from his new memoir Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons (published by Viking in March 2007) and taking questions, Thomas will share the gritty reality of an American’s life in a foreign prison: its unforgettable pains and its unexpected and beautiful lessons.

Cullen Thomas grew up in Port Washington, New York and graduated from Binghamton University in 1992 with a degree in English. While teaching English in South Korea in 1993, Thomas was convicted on a narcotics charge and served a 3 ½ year sentence. Released in 1997, he returned to New York, working as a writer, teacher and editor of The Princeton Review. From 2002 to 2005 Thomas served as a staff writer and assistant editor at Current Biography. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Salon, Rhythm, Chamber Music Magazine, and the Korea Times.

Death of an American writer: Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

Norman Mailer, the bad conscience and public accuser of all things American, died yesterday, Saturday November 10th, at age 84, succumbing to renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital. Author of about thirty books, twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, he was one of the most flamboyant protagonists of the American intellectual scene, decade after decade.
Born Norman Kingsley, on January 31, 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, in a middle-class Jewish family, Mailer, a brilliant student, entered Harvard in 1939, where he graduated in aeronautical engineering four years later, fought in the Pacific during World War II. In 1948, he published The Naked and the Dead, a war novel whose raw realism won instant critical and popular acclaim: the book was translated in twenty languages
Later on, the writer became known as a critical and subversive observer of the US, in works dealing with the ever-changing flow of current affairs and his own life's: An American Dream (1965), Why Are We In Vietnam? (1967), The Armies of the Night (Pulitzer prize, 1969) and Prisoner of Sex (1971). Most of his books stirred some degree of controversy: from Marilyn (1973), a novelized biography of Marilyn Monroe, to The Executioner's Song (Pulitzer prize, 1980), an epic, sprawling narrative based on more than 300 interviews of death-row inmate Gary Gilmore, considered by many to be his masterpiece, and of the best illustrations of his journalistic work, a style of literary reportage mixing fiction and nonfiction.

As years went by, Norman Mailer built his own biographical legend, that of a turbulent literary figure, basking in self-complacency and scandal: a brawler and a boxer, a big mouth and a hard drinker, heavy smoker, and inveterate philanderer, he got married six times – stabbed one of his spouses, Adele in 1960. His last wife was painter Norris Church –, made five awesomely bad movies, ran for mayor of New York (not his smartest move), recited pornographic poetry (no comment) or publicly insulted fellow writer Gore Vidal, among (many) other things...
The co-founder of the Village Voice never stopped writing. And he proceeded to climb more mountains: his penultimate book, The castle in the Forest, released early 2007, is a novel about Hitler's youth, told by a demon, an underling of Satan. His last book, An Uncommon Conversation, was also his last-ditch affirmation of an obstinate life-wish.