Showing results by author "Norman Mailer" in All Categories

"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.

The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler's parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the 20th century, Mailer's novel delivers myriad twists and surprises along with characteristically astonishing insights into the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.

Many kids write stories, but only a few of them grow up to be successful authors. Before there was Carrie, there was "Johnathan and the Witchs." And before there was Rabbit Angstrom, Toyota dealer, there was Manuel Cirarro, famous detective. Could we have seen the seeds of success in Stephen King's and John Updike's juvenilia? These young writers are the same people who dominated the best seller lists and occupy the most celebrated spots on bookshelves in our stores, libraries, and homes.

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.

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.

First published in the early days of the Iraq War, Why Are We at War? is an explosive argument about the American quest for empire that still carries weight today. Scrutinizing the Bush administration's words and actions, Mailer unleashes his trademark moral rigor: "Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered.... To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad."

Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific - or more exposed - than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published - most for the first time - in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and several lifetimes.

A MAJOR NEW NOVEL FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST MEN OF LETTERS 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...

A MAJOR NEW NOVEL FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST MEN OF LETTERS 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...