Stormin' Norman

Norman Mailer talks to Melvyn Bragg tonight at 6.45pm, Curzon West End, London, W1. Details on 0171-439 4805. Tickets cost pounds 8. Sponsore d by the Independent on Sunday and Waterstone's.

Norman Mailer will be making a rare public appearance at the Curzon cinema on London's Shaftesbury Avenue tonight. Melvin Bragg will be on stage with him to discuss the author's latest, controversial novel about the life of Christ, The Gospel Acording to the Son. It looks like he won't get an easy ride. The Independent's literary critic, Boyd Tonkin, described the book as "not blasphemous; just bland". The charge, then, is not that Mailer has gone too far, but that he hasn't gone far enough, borrowing at crucial moments from the age-old dramas of the Gospels themselves.

`The Gospel According to the Son' publ by Little, Brown at pounds 14.