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Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer

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About This Author

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of
The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including
The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize;
The Executioner's Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize;
Harlot's Ghost; Oswald's Tale; and
The Gospel According to the Son. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with his wife, the novelist Norris Church Mailer.

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of
The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including
The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize;
The Executioner's Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize;
Harlot's Ghost; Oswald's Tale; and
The Gospel According to the Son. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with his wife, the novelist Norris Church Mailer.

Books by thisAuthor

Mind of an Outlaw
Selected Essays
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Mind of an Outlaw
Selected Essays
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The Naked and the Dead
50th Anniversary Edition, With a New...
Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially doe the occasion by Norman Mailer. Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.
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The Castle in the Forest
A Novel
No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant, varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span of more than six decades, Mailer has searched into subjects ranging from World War II to Ancient Egypt, from the march on the Pentagon to Marilyn Monroe, from Henry Miller and Mohammad Ali to Jesus Christ. Now, in The Castle in the Forest, his first major work of fiction in more than a decade, Mailer offers what may be his consummate literary endeavor: He has set out to explore the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be an exceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well as Hitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence. A tapestry of unforgettable characters, The Castle in the Forest delivers its playful twists and surprises with astonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all. At its core is a hypothesis that propels this novel and makes it a work of stunning originality. Now, on the eve of his eighty-fourth birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before. From the Hardcover edition.
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The Armies of the Night
History as a Novel, the Novel as History
One of the first examples of "new journalism" daringly combines reportage with a novelistic style and garnered Mailer his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1968.
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On God
An Uncommon Conversation
The final book from Norman Mailer, towering figure of American literature, in which he offers his concept of the nature of God “I feel no attachment, whatsoever, to organized religion” wrote Norman Mailer. “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks.” And in this collection of moving, amusing, probing, and uncommon dialogues conducted over three years before his death, Mailer establishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both organized religion and atheism. He presents instead a view of our world as one created by an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of determined opposition by contrary powers in the universe with whom war is waged for the souls of humans. Mailer weighs the possibilities of “intelligent design,” at the same time avowing that sensual pleasures were bestowed on us by God; he finds fault with the Ten Commandments–because adultery, he avers, may be a lesser evil than others suffered in a bad marriage; and he holds that technology was the Devil’s most brilliant creation. In short, Mailer is original and unpredictable in this inspiring verbal journey, in which “God needs us as much as we need God." Praise for On God: “[Displays] the glory of an original mind in full provocation.” –USA Today “[Mailer’s] theology is not theoretical to him. After eight decades, it is what he believes. He expects no adherents, and does not profess to be a prophet, but he has worked to forge his beliefs into a coherent catechism.” –New York “At once illuminating and exciting . . . a chance to see Mailer’s intellect as well as his lively conversational style of speech.” –American Jewish Life
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Harlot's Ghost
A Novel
"The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today." CHICAGO TRIBUNE Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country.... A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
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Barbary Shore
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Miami and the Siege of Chicago
1968. The Vietnam War was raging. President Lyndon Johnson, facing a challenge in his own Democratic Party from the maverick antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, announced that he would not seek a second term. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots broke out in inner cities throughout America. Bobby Kennedy was killed after winning the California primary in June. In August, Republicans met in Miami, picking the little-loved Richard Nixon as their candidate, while in September, Democrats in Chicago backed the ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey. TVs across the country showed antiwar protesters filling the streets of Chicago and the police running amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer, America’s most protean and provocative writer, brings a novelist’s eye to bear on the events of 1968, a decisive year in modern American politics, from which today’s bitterly divided country arose.
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Oswald's Tale
An American Mystery
"MARVELOUS . . . BREATHTAKING." --The New York Times Book Review "MAILER SHINES . . . Explaining Kennedy's assassination through the flaws in Oswald's character has been attempted before, notably by Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don Delillo in Libra. But neither handled Oswald with the kind of dexterity and literary imagination that Mailer here supplies in great force. . . . Oswald's Tale weaves a story not only about Oswald or Kennedy's death but about the culture surrounding the assassination, one that remains replete with miscomprehensions, unraveled threads and lack of resolution: All of which makes Oswald's Tale more true-to-life than any fact-driven treatise could hope to be. . . . Vintage Mailer." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "FASCINATING . . . A MASTER STORYTELLER . . . Mailer gives us our clearest, deepest view of Oswald yet. . . . Inside three pages you are utterly absorbed." --Detroit Free Press "MAILER AT HIS BEST . . . LIVELY AND CONVINCING . . . EXTREMELY LUCID . . . Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . [He] has found a way to make the dry bones of KGB tapes and his own interviews stand up and perform. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection." --Robert Stone The New York Review of Books "THIS IS A NARRATIVE OF TREMENDOUS ENERGY AND PANACHE; THE AUTHOR AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM." --Christopher Hitchens Financial Times "Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn't one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot's Ghost, it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity." --Martin Amis The London Sunday Times
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The Spooky Art
Thoughts on Writing
In The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer discusses with signature candor the rewards and trials of the writing life, and recommends the tools to navigate it. Addressing the reader in a conversational tone, he draws on the best of more than fifty years of his own criticism, advice, and detailed observations about the writer’s craft.
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The Faith of Graffiti
"The Faith is the bible of graffiti. It forever captures the place, the time, and the writings of those of us who made it happen." Snake I In 1973, author Norman Mailer teamed with photographer Jon Naar to produce The Faith of Graffiti, a fearless exploration of the birth of the street art movement in New York City. The book coupled Mailer's essay on the origins and importance of graffiti in modern urban culture with Naar's radiant, arresting photographs of the young graffiti writers' work. The result was a powerful, impressionistic account of artistic ferment on the streets of a troubled and changing cityand an iconic documentary record of a critical body of work now largely lost to history. This new edition of The Faith of Graffiti, the first in more than three decades, brings this vibrant workthe seminal document on the origins of street artto contemporary readers. Photographer Jon Naar has enhanced the original with thirty-two pages of additional photographs that are new to this edition, along with an afterword in which he reflects on the project and the meaning it has taken on in the intervening decades. It stands now, as it did then, as a rich survey of a group of outsider artists and the body of work they createdand a provocative defense of a generation that questioned the bounds of authority over aesthetics.
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Why Are We in Vietnam?
A Novel
When Why Are We in Vietnam? was published in 1967, almost twenty years after The Naked and the Dead, the critical response was ecstatic. The novel fully confirmed Mailer's stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality. Narrated by Ranald ("D.J.") Jethroe, Texas's most precocious teenager, on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam, this story of a hunting trip in Alaska is both brilliantly entertaining and profoundly thoughtful.
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Advertisements for Myself
Originally published in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Mailer at his brilliant, provocative, outrageous best. Emerging at the height of "hip," Advertisements is at once a chronicle of a crucial era in the formation of modern American culture and an important contribution to the great autobiographical tradition in American letters.
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Tough Guys Don't Dance
"A novel that is as brash and brooding and ultimately as mesmerizing as the author himself...The dazzling balance betwen humor and horror keeps us plunging on....As for characters, each is a gem....It is a book to read with infinite pleasures." NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tim Madden awakes one morning with a gruesome hangover, a painful tatoo on his upper arm, blood all over the passenger seat of his Porsche, a severed female head in his marijuana stash, and almost no memory of his actions on the preceding evening. He is about to discover what they were and what he is....
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The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore now in a brand-new edition. Arguably the greatest book from America's most heroically ambitious writer, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. And that fight for the right to die is what made him famous. Mailer tells not only Gilmore's story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement-impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
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The Big Empty
Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing,...
Questions are posed, writes Norman Mailer, "in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions." In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years. Their wide-ranging discussions take place over the course of a year, beginning in July 2004. Set against the backdrop of George W. Bush's re-election campaign and the war in Iraq, each considers what it means to live in America today. John asks his father to look back to World War II, and explore the parallels that canand cannotbe drawn between that time and our current post-9/11 consciousness. As their conversations develop, the topics shift from the political to the personal to the political again, as they duck and weave around one another. They explore their shared admiration of boxing and poker, the nature of marriage and love, television, movies, writing, and what it means to be a part of this extraordinary family.
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The Deer Park
Amid the cactus wilds some two hudred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want—and how far the are willing to go to get it. The Deer Park is the story of two interlacing love affairs. Sergius O'Shaugnessy is a young ex-Air Force pilot whose good looks and air of indifference launch him into the orbit of the radiant actress Lulu Meyers. Charles Eitel is a brilliant director wounded by accusations of communism—and whose liaison with the volatile Elena Esposito may supply the coup de grace to his career. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America's machinery of desire.
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Prisoner of Sex
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Moonfire
The Epic Journey of Apollo 11
A unique tribute to the defining scientific mission of our time "MoonFireis the greatest book I have ever seen. The photography is unparalleled...It is more than just a book, it is an experience." — David Schonauer,American Photo It has been calledthe single most historic event of the 20th century:On July 20, 1969Neil Armstrong, Buzz AldrinandMichael Collinsmet John F. Kennedy's call for a manned Moon landing by the end of the 1960s. A decade of tests and training, a staff of 400,000 engineers and scientists, a budget of $24 billion, and the most powerful rocket ever launched all combined in an unprecedented event watched by millions the world over.And no one captured the men, the mood, and the machinery like Norman Mailer. One of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, Norman Mailerwas hired by LIFE in 1969 to cover the Moon shot. His three-part feature was the longest nonfiction piece LIFE had published. He enhanced and extended his reportage with deeper reflection in the brilliantly crafted book, Of a Fire on the Moon, excerpted here for the first time. Equally adept at examining the science of space travel and the psychology of the men involved—from Saturn V rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, to the crucial NASA support staff, to the three astronauts—Mailer provides provocative and trenchant insights into this epoch-making event. Illustrating this volume are hundreds of the best photographs and maps from the NASA vaults, magazine archives, and private collections.Many of them previously unpublished, these images document the development of the agency and the mission, life inside the command module and on the Moon’s surface, and the world’s jubilant reaction to the landing. This edition includes an original introduction by Colum McCann and captions by leading Apollo 11 experts, explaining the history and science behind the images, citing the mission log and publications of the day, and post-flight astronaut interviews. The book you couldn't get your hands on is finally available in bookstores everywhere!Originally published as a TASCHEN Limited Edition, Norman Mailer'sMoonFiresold out instantly and earned accolades from publications the world over.
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BookishEssential List

THIS AUTHOR'S BOOKS ARE ON 5 BOOKISH LISTS INCLUDING:

American Fiction: 20th Century Espionage Norman Mailer Promiscuous Protagonists Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fiction

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