Norman Mailer Books

Essays and Interviews with and by Norman Mailer covering the decade 1970-1980

Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is not just a monumental war novel but also a devastating antiwar novel, exposing the primal nature of power through the interplay of a platoon of soldiers on an impossible and ultimately pointless mission on an obscure island in the Pacific during World War II. Written just after the war ended, in the early days of the emerging Cold War, the novel daringly engages with the authoritarian impulses in the American character

An essential guide to the life and work of one of America's most controversial writers, Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics. Also included is his notorious exposition of the phenomenon of the 'White Negro', the Beat Generation's existentialist hero whose life, like Mailer's, is 'an unchartered journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self'.

Bert Stern's "Last Sitting" photographs of Marilyn Monroe enter a dialogue with Norman Mailer's rigorous biography of the actress in this virtuoso publication. The fusion of image and text makes for an intimate portrait of an infamously enigmatic woman; a celebrity who shone even in tragedy. In this bold synthesis of literary classic and...

A work of meticulous research and breathtaking insight, Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery asks the essential question about the Kennedy Assassination: Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? Providing the first full account of his childhood, the years under KGB surveillance in Russia and the events from his return to the United States in 1961 to his death in Dallas. Norman Mailer brilliantly reconstructs the life of this ambitious, doom-laden young man, bringing to the task not only a sober respect for the facts but the power, as America's most distinguished novelist. To invest those facts with vibrant and haunting life.

Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in the ring. Foreman's genius employed silence, serenity and cunning. He had never been defeated. His hands were his instrument, and 'he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case'. This book focuses on the 1975 World... číst celé

In what is arguably his greatest book--written in 1979 and reissued here in trade paperback--America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who---after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood--insisted on dying for his crime.

Reissue of a modern classic that launched Norman Mailer's fame upon its original publication in 1948.

The first posthumous publication from this outsize literary icon, "Mind of an Outlaw" collects Mailer's most important and representative work in the form that many rank as his most electrifying