Download or read book Understanding Norman Mailer written by Maggie McKinley and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book of literary criticism to examine this Pulitzer Prize winner's entire body of work As a renowned novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, speaker, aspiring politician, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Norman Mailer was one of the most prominent American literary and cultural figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Over the course of his expansive sixty-year career, Mailer published nearly forty original works of fiction and nonfiction, served as a counterculture activist, and was cofounder of the Village Voice. Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer also received the National Book Award and the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to Arts and Letters, a lifetime achievement award granted by the National Book Foundation. Understanding Norman Mailer is the first book of literary criticism to address Mailer's impressive body of work in its entirety, from his first publication to his last. Situating these volumes in their historical and cultural context, Maggie McKinley traces the major themes and philosophies that pervade Mailer's canon, analyzing his representations of gender, sexuality, violence, technology, politics, faith, celebrity, existentialism, and national identity. McKinley moves chronologically through Mailer's career, illuminating the many genres, styles, and perspectives with which Mailer experimented over time, demonstrating his remarkable artistic reach. McKinley also addresses Mailer's reputation as a combative public figure who, amid controversy surrounding his personal life and public persona, remained committed to lively intellectual debate. Through Understanding Norman Mailer, an accessible introduction to Mailer's life and work, McKinley offers a unique retrospective, articulating the development and changes within Mailer's ideas over time while highlighting concerns that remained at the center of his work for decades.
Download or read book Why Are We at War written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with his debut masterpiece, The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer has repeatedly told the truth about war. Why Are We at War? returns Mailer to the gravity of the battlefield and the grand hubris of the politicians who send soldiers there to die. 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.” Praise for Why Are We at War? “We’re overloaded with information these days, some of it possibly true. Mailer offers a provocative—and persuasive—cultural and intellectual frame.”—Newsweek “[Mailer] still has the stamina to churn out hard-hitting criticism.”—Los Angeles Times “Penetrating . . . There’s plenty of irreverent wit and fresh thinking on display.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Eloquent . . . thoughtful . . . Why Are We at War? pulls no punches.”—Fort Worth Star-Telegram 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
Download or read book Norman Mailer in Context written by Maggie McKinley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers new insight into the breadth of contexts that inform Norman Mailer's body of work. It examines important literary, critical, theoretical, cultural, and historical frameworks for Mailer's writing, highlighting the ways his work reflects the concerns of twentieth and twenty-first century America. This book traces Mailer's literary influences; his contributions to a variety of literary genres; his participation in the American political sphere; the philosophical, religious, and gendered contexts that shape his work; and the iconic American figures he profiled. The book concludes with reflections on Mailer's literary and cultural legacy, emphasizing his advocacy for literary freedom and the contemporary resonance of his work.
Download or read book Miami and the Siege of Chicago written by Norman Mailer and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-04-18 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book An American Dream written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner’s Song. As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go. Praise for An American Dream “Perhaps the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby.”—Joan Didion, National Review “A devil’s encyclopedia of our secret visions and desires . . . the expression of a devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life “A work of fierce concentration . . . perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic [with] a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity.”—Harper’s “At once violent, educated, and cool . . . This is our history as Hawthorne might have written it.”—Commentary 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
Download or read book Norman Mailer A Double Life written by J. Michael Lennon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes bibliographical references (p. [907]-914) and index.
Download or read book Ancient Evenings written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 857 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Norman Mailer’s dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel of ancient Egypt breathes life into the figures of a lost 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. Mailer’s reincarnated protagonist is carried through the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile, and into the terrifying clash of battle. An extraordinary work of inventiveness, Ancient Evenings lives on in the mind long after the last page has been turned. Praise for Ancient Evenings “Astounding, beautifully written . . . a leap of imagination that crosses three millennia to Pharaonic Egypt.”—USA Today “Mailer makes a miraculous present out of age-deep memories, bringing to life the rhythms, the images, the sensuousness of a lost time.”—The New York Times “Mailer’s Egypt is a haunting and magical place. . . . The reader wallows in the scope, depth, the sheer magnitude and—yes—the fertility of his imagination.”—The Washington Post Book World “An enormous pyramid of a novel [reminiscent of] Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra.”—Los Angeles Herald Examiner 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
Download or read book Why Are We in Vietnam written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is impossible to walk away from this novel without being sharply reminded of the fact that Norman Mailer is a writer of extraordinary ability.”—Chicago Tribune Featuring a new foreword by Mailer scholar Maggie McKinley Published nearly twenty years after Norman Mailer’s fiction debut, The Naked and the Dead, this acclaimed novel further solidified the author’s stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Ranald “D. J.” Jethroe, Texas’s most precocious teenager, recounts a brutal hunting trip he took to Alaska—in a story of fathers and sons, myth and masculinity, character and corruption. Both entertaining and profound, Why Are We in Vietnam? is an exceptional, timeless work awaiting discovery by a new generation of readers. Praise for Why Are We in Vietnam? “A book of great integrity. All the old qualities are here: Mailer’s remarkable feeling for the sensory event, the detail, ‘the way it was,’ his power and energy.”—The New York Review of Books “A tour de force, a treatise on human nature.”—The Dallas Morning News “A brilliant piece of writing.”—Newsweek “Original, courageous, and provocative.”—The New York Times
Download or read book Literary Rivals written by Richard Bradford and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelists, poets and playwrights live double lives, sharing the real world with everyone else while spending a good deal of time in a universe of their own making. When they fall out with each other, they are able to kindle feuds and antagonisms as passionate and public as workers in any trade. Richard Bradford's highly entertaining book looks at some of the closest and most complex relationships in literary history, as well as examining their dramatic effects on literature itself. - WHO WAS THE OBJECT OF COLERIDGE'S INFATUATION THAT DROVE A W EDGE BETWEEN HIMSELF AND WORDSWORTH? - WHERE DID THACKERAY UTTER THE SINGLE SENTENCE THAT ENDED HIS TENTATIVE FRIENDSHIP WITH DICKENS? - WHY DID DIFFERING OPINIONS LEAD TO THE CESSATION OF LETTERS BETWEEN FORMER CONFIDANTS AMIS AND LARKIN? - HOW DID HEMINGWAY USE AND ABUSE STEIN'S ARTISTIC CIRCLE IN PARIS? - WHAT AMERICAN L ITERARY AMBITION SPAWNED BRUTAL COMPETITION BETWEEN CAPOTE AND V IDAL? From Tolstoy's deferred duelling and Dostoevsky's defamatory fiction, to J. C. Squire's qualms with modernism and Salman Rushdie's run-in with Islam, Literary Rivals is an enjoyable romp through the world of the fiercest writers' rivalries and the most bizarre literary stand-offs.
Download or read book Norman Mailer in Context written by Maggie McKinley and published by Literature in Context. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers new insight into the contextual background and literary-historical impact of Norman Mailer's body of work.
Download or read book The Armies of the Night written by Norman Mailer and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Marilyn written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1973, Norman Mailer published 'Marilyn', his celebrated in-depth account of the life of Marilyn Monroe, as a glossy, fully illustrated coffee-table tome. Now, it has been made available in an accessible mass-market paperback edition.
Download or read book The Executioner s Song written by Norman Mailer and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Armies of the Night written by Norman Mailer and published by Odyssey Editions. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Armies of the Night chronicles the famed October 1967 March on the Pentagon, in which all of the old and new Left—hippies, yuppies, Weathermen, Quakers, Christians, feminists, and intellectuals—came together to protest the Vietnam War. Alongside his contemporaries, Mailer went, witnessed, participated, suffered, and then wrote one of the most stark and intelligent appraisals of the 1960s: its myths, heroes, and demons. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a cornerstone of New Journalism, The Armies of the Night is not only a fascinating foray into that mysterious terrain between novel and history, fiction and nonfiction, but also a key chapter in the autobiography of Norman Mailer—who, in this nonfiction novel, becomes his own great character, letting history in all its complexity speak through him.
Download or read book A Fire on the Moon written by Norman Mailer and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Literature in America written by Peter Conn and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1989-08-25 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Conn summarises the distinctive achievements of the American literary heritage from early 1600's to late 1980's.
Download or read book The Fight written by Norman Mailer and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaïre, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible “professor of boxing.” The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble. Observing them was Norman Mailer, a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity. Whether he is analyzing the fighters’ moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer’s grasp of the titanic battle’s feints and stratagems—and his sensitivity to their deeper symbolism—makes this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport. Praise for The Fight “Exquisitely refined and attenuated . . . [a] sensitive portrait of an extraordinary athlete and man, and a pugilistic drama fully as exciting as the reality on which it is based.”—The New York Times “One of the defining texts of sports journalism. Not only does Mailer recall the violent combat with a scholar’s eye . . . he also makes the whole act of reporting seem as exciting as what’s occurring in the ring.”—GQ “Stylistically, Mailer was the greatest boxing writer of all time.”—Chuck Klosterman, Esquire “One of Mailer’s finest books.”—Louis Menand, The New Yorker 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
