Norman Mailer – författare

One man’s death wish became America’s obsession.In 1976, Gary Gilmore murdered two men - then demanded to die for it. His trial and televised execution became a media spectacle, and ensured that his execution turned into the most gruesome media event of the decade.Mailer’s Pulitzer-winning epic combines journalistic detail with novelistic intensity. The Executioner’s Song is not just a chronicle of crime, but a haunting portrait of a country addicted to retribution.

Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead' is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare.Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon stationed on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific during World War II, and written in a journalistic style, it tells the moving story of the soldiers' struggle to retain a sense of dignity amidst the horror of warfare, and to find a source of meaning in their lives amisdst the sounds and fury of battle.

From one of the major innovators of New Journalism, Norman Mailer's The Fight is the real-life story of a clash between two of the world's greatest boxers, both in and out of the ring, published in Penguin Modern Classics.Norman Mailer's The Fight focuses on the 1974 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire. 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'. Together the two men made boxing history in an explosive meeting of two great minds, two iron wills and monumental egos.'"If ever a fighter had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth-century art, it must be Ali", says Norm, and his achievement in this masterly book is of a similar order, demonstrating that writing about sport can also be a twentieth-century art'Geoff Dyer, New Statesman'Probably no one has written about boxing better than Mailer has'Guardian

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.

The definitive Norman Mailer collection, as he writes on Marilyn Monroe, culture, ideology, boxing, Hemingway, politics, sex, celebrity and - of course - Norman MailerFrom his early 'A Credo for the Living', published in 1948, when the author was twenty-five, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his times. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Mind of an Outlaw spans the full arc of Mailer's evolution as a writer, including such essential pieces as his acclaimed 1957 meditation on hipsters, 'The White Negro'; multiple selections from his wonderful Advertisements for Myself; and a never-before-published essay on Freud. The book is introduced by Jonathan Lethem.

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'

October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C. 20,000 to 200,000 protesters are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day's events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mould of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties' tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

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.

Miami, Summer 1968. The Vietnam War is raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy have just been assassinated. The Republican Party meets in Miami and picks Richard Nixon as its candidate, to little fanfare. But when the Democrats back Lyndon Johnson's ineffectual vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the city of Chicago erupts. Antiwar protesters fill the streets and the police run amok, beating and arresting demonstrators and delegates alike, all broadcast on live television, and captured in these pages by one of America's fiercest intellects.

Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer with a penchant for nicotine, alcohol and blondes with money, struggles towards consciousness twenty-four days and nights after his wife has left him. He has a bad case of alcohol amnesia, a fresh and throbbing tattoo and a car drenched in blood. Just to make his hangover complete, Provincetown's Chief of Police would like a quiet word...So begins Madden's disquieting journey into the dark recesses of America's psyche. TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE is Norman Mailer at his tough, raw and uncompromising best. And Madden's tormented efforts to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening turn, inevitably into fragments of the American Nightmare.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Originally published in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Norman 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.

'Genius' The New York TimesIn 1973, Norman Mailer published Marilyn, his celebrated in-depth account of the life of Marilyn Monroe, as a glossy, fully illustrated coffee-table tome. His work was immediately acclaimed - and an enduring bestseller, rumoured to have sold more copies than any of his other works except The Naked and the Dead. Yet, until now, it has never been made available in an accessible mass-market paperback edition. This is one of America's greatest writers taking on the legend of one of Hollywood's greatest stars.