Norman Mailer

The novelists interpretes and dramatizes the October 1967 anti-war demonstration in Washington and the issues and politics involved

History as a Novel, the Novel as History

The Armies of the Night

A prominent college professor enters a world of terror after murdering his wife.

An American Dream

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.

The Executioner's Song

This novel of the CIA centers on Hugh Tremont Montague, a CIA patrician with a core of madness

Harlot's Ghost

Portrays all aspects of Marilyn Monroe's life and explores her complexity as a woman and actress

A Biography

Marilyn

The spirited chronicler of war, politics, sex, and modern life trains his wits and sights on the principles, promoters, and observers of the 1974 Ali-Forman championship boxing match held in Kinshasa, Zaire. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

The Fight

Ancient Evenings, a dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel, recreates the long-lost civilisation of Ancient Egypt. Mailer breathes life into the figures of that era; the eighteenth dynasty Pharaoh Rameses and his wife, Queen Nefertiti; Menenhetet, their creature, lover and victim; and the gods and mortals that surround them in intimate and telepathic communion. His hero, three times reincarnated during the novel, moves in the bright sunlight of white temples, in the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile and in the terrifying clash of battle. An outstanding work of creative imagination, Ancient Evenings displays Mailer's obsession with magic, violence and eroticism and lives on in the mind long after the last page has been turned.

Ancient Evenings

Desert D'Or is the fashionable Californian resort where Hollywood's elite converge when they need a break. It is an incestuous hothouse of a town - a haven for manipulators, film stars, lovers, pimps, producers, whores, gamblers, scriptwriters and cheats. Into this nightmare world of depravity arrives Sergius O'Shaughnessy, recently discharged from the Air Force, traumatised by his ar experiences and trying to write the Great American Novel. But O'Shaughnessy's burning ambition begins to lose its edge; lured by greed and rules by weakness, he soon becomes disturbingly familiar with the dnagerous life of slick compromises and sexual follies... The Deer Park is a powerful and vigorous satire on Hollywood's excesses and corruption. Combining a savage imagination with a heightened documentary realism, Mailer paints an uncompromising and terrifying portriat of a decadent society lost in moral confusion and despair.

The Deer Park

a novel

The castle in the forest

The Fight (Penguin Modern Classics)

Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressing it, “as if I were a man enclosing another man within.” In its brevity and piercing simplicity, it may be Mailer’s most accessible, direct, and heartfelt work. Praise for The Gospel According to the Son “Quietly penetrating . . . [Norman Mailer’s] gospel is written in a direct, rather relaxed English that yet has an eerie, neo-Biblical dignity.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “A book of considerable intellectual force . . . The writer’s powerful mind works in a specialized way, not by theological argumentation but by telling or retelling a story.”—The New York Review of Books “Challenges readers on the religious right and the atheist left with equally rich interpretive tasks.”—The Dallas Morning News “An informed and believable work of fiction . . . of what may have been going through the mind of Jesus during his epic ministry.”—San Francisco Chronicle Praise for Norman Mailer “[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books “The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—The Cincinnati Post

A Novel

The Gospel According to the Son

Three Texans on a hunting trip in Alaska are the protagonists in a modern parable of violence, in a novel narrated by a precocious teenager on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Why Are We in Vietnam?

an American mystery

Oswald's tale

For 2,000 years, the brief ministry of a young Nazarene preacher has remained the largest single determinant of Western civilisation's triumphs and disasters. In THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON, Norman Mailer gives the protagonist of one of the greatest tragedies of all time a chance to tell the story of his life in his own words. 'Is God speaking to me?' Jesus asks, 'or am I hearing voices? If the voices are from God, why has he chosen me as His son? and if they are not from God, then who gave me the power to perform these miracles?' This is a gripping account of a man thrust forward by the visions he receives and the miracles he enacts until he has come to the very limit of human possibilities. In THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON, one of the world's greatest living writers has brought us a remarkable book - by turns poetic and tragic and, to our surprise and pleasure, suspenseful.

Mailer's superb account, written as it was happening, of the first attempt to land men on the moon 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.' A Fire on the Moon tells the scarcely credible story of the Apollo 11 mission. It is suffused with Mailer's obsession both with the astronauts themselves and with his own anxieties and terrors about the extremity of what they were trying to achieve. Mailer is both admiring and appalled and the result is a book which is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant depiction of the now-forgotten technical issues and uncertainties around the mission. A Fire on the Moon is also a matchless portrait of an America caught in a morass of introspection and misery, torn apart by the war in Vietnam. But for one, extraordinary week in the summer of 1969 all eyes were on the fates of three men in a rocket, travelling a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. With an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

A Fire on the Moon

A mysterious SS man offers an insightful glimpse of the life and career of Adolf Hitler, offering a unique perspective on his family, his childhood and adolescence, and the evolution of the man who became the personification of evil, in a panoramic novel that explores the essence of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.

The Castle in the Forest

Um sonho americano conta, na primeira pessoa, a história de Stephen Rojack, um herói de guerra condecorado, ex-congressista e um respeitado intelectual que tem seu próprio programa de televisão. Stephen é casado com uma bela e rica mulher da alta sociedade, Deborah. A vida de aparências que ambos levam esconde, na verdade, um casamento fracassado. Em um dia qualquer, sem razão aparente, uma discussão corriqueira – cheia de acusações e ressentimentos – termina fatidicamente: tomado pela fúria, Stephen estrangula a mulher e depois a joga pela janela de um bonito apartamento nova-iorquino, tentando forjar um suicídio. Esse ato não-planejado terá conseqüências imediatas na vida de Stephen que, de representante ideal do "sonho americano" é catapultado num mundo marginal de ruelas escuras, gângsteres e policiais corruptos. Um dos mais controversos jornalistas do século XX, Norman Mailer causou profundo impacto ao retratar o fracasso do homem frente ao poderio do país mais influente do mundo, que pode ser uma potência econômica, mas que não oferece oportunidades concretas de êxito para seus cidadãos, criando uma legião de frustrados e losers. O autor desconstrói o sonho americano abusando de cenas brutais e descrições por vezes escatológicas, mergulhando seu personagem em situações-limite e oferecendo-lhe, inclusive, a tentativa de suicídio como saída para esse cotidiano nauseante.

Um sonho americano

An American novelist records his reaction to the delegates, the issues, and the events of the 1968 conventions

An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

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.

Some Thoughts on Writing

The Spooky Art

Story of CIA intelligence officer Harry Hubbard, and his mentor Hugh Tremont Montague code name Harlot.

Norman Mailer

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