Norman Mailer

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Washington

Stephen Rojack is a decorated war hero, a former Congressman, and a certified public intellectual with his own television show. He is also married to the very rich, very beautiful, and utterly amoral Deborah Caughlin Kelly. But one night, in the prime of his existence, he hears the moon talking to him on the terrace of a fashionable New York high-rise, and it is urging him to kill himself. It is almost as a defense against that infinitely seductive voice that Rojack murders his wife.
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 Rojack 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. Sensual, horrifying, and informed by a vision that is 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.

An American Dream

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New York

A Novel

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

The Gospel According to the Son

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1984 First Random House edition. Unbroken spine, pristine. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

"A novel that is as brash and brooding and ultimately as mesmerizing as the author himself...The dazzling balance betwen humor and horror keeps us plunging on....As for characters, each is a gem....It is a book to read with infinite pleasures." NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tim Madden awakes one morning with a gruesome hangover, a painful tatoo on his upper arm, blood all over the passenger seat of his Porsche, a severed female head in his marijuana stash, and almost no memory of his actions on the preceding evening. He is about to discover what they were and what he is.... From the Paperback edition.

Tough Guys Don't Dance

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Ancient Evenings

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no moisture exposure little shelf wear clean print

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

50th Anniversary Edition, with a New Introduction by the Author

Portrays the contrasting personalities and nostalgic reminiscences of a group of World War II American soldiers engaged in a combat operation against the Japanese. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The Naked and the Dead   19/26

276f135f-7b14-4804-9b3e-58eebd233725

Oregon

The Naked and the Dead

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

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Tennessee

History As a Novel, the Novel As History

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer's seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America's two highest literary awards, 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.
 
The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors 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 a writer named 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 mold 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.
 
"[Mailer's] genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring, render The Armies of the Night an artful document, worthy to be judged as literature."--Time

"Only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive."--Alfred Kazin, The New York Times Book Review

The Armies of the Night

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First Owl Book edition, 1981, 1st printing. Light shelf wear.

North Carolina

Louisiana

Florida

An American Mystery

A portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald is based on interviews with former acquaintances and research gathered from Minsk, where Oswald hid for more than two years after defecting to the Soviet Union. 150,000 first printing. Tour.

Oswald's Tale

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Book overview
In the Egypt of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties--1290-1100 B.C.--Menenhetet is reincarnated three times, his fate taking him from peasant childhood, to power as the pharaoh's most intimate adviser, to the squalor of grave robbing

Georgia

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

Some Thoughts on Writing

“Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words.” 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. Mailer explores, among other topics, the use of first person versus third person, the pressing need for discipline, the pitfalls of early success, and the dire matter of coping with bad reviews. While The Spooky Art offers a fascinating preview of what can lie in wait for the student and fledgling writer, the book also has a great deal to say to more advanced writers on the contrary demands of plot and character, the demon writer’s block, and the curious ins-and-outs of publishing. Throughout, Mailer ties in examples from his own career, and reflects on the works of his fellow writers, living and dead—Twain, Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, Updike, Didion, Bellow, Styron, Beckett, and a host of others. In The Spooky Art, Mailer captures the unique untold suffering and exhilaration of the novelist’s daily life and, while plotting a clear path for other writers to follow, maintains reverence for the underlying mystery and power of the art.

The Spooky Art

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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.

New Jersey

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

Harlot's Ghost

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Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

"The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today." CHICAGO TRIBUNE Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country.... A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club

Oklahoma

Only a novelist as daring as Mailer would attempt to retell the story of Jesus in Jesus's own words. . . . Its penetration into Jesus's human heart rivals Dostoyevsky for depth and insight. Its re-creation of the world through which Jesus walked is as real as blood. Ultimately, Mailer convinces, more than any writer before him, that for Jesus the man it could have been just like this; and that is, in itself, some sort of literary miracle".--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review).

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

In perhaps his most important literary feat, Norman Mailer fashions an unprecedented portrait of one of the great villains—and enigmas—in United States history. Here is Lee Harvey Oswald—his family background, troubled marriage, controversial journey to Russia, and return to an “America [waiting] for him like an angry relative whose eyes glare in the heat.” Based on KGB and FBI transcripts, government reports, letters and diaries, and Mailer’s own international research, this is an epic account of a man whose cunning, duplicity, and self-invention were both at home in and at odds with the country he forever altered. Praise for Oswald’s Tale “America’s largest mystery has found its greatest interpreter.”—The Washington Post Book World “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection.”—Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books “A narrative of tremendous energy and panache; the author at the top of his form.”—Christopher Hitchens, Financial Times “The performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity.”—Martin Amis, The Sunday Times (London) 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

Colorado

1000+ page book that is heavy. Spine slightly out of square. 

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Norman Mailer

An American Dream

Norman Mailer

The Gospel According to the Son

Norman Mailer

Tough Guys Don't Dance

Norman Mailer

Ancient Evenings

Norman Mailer

The Naked and the Dead 19/26

Norman Mailer

The Gospel According to the Son

Norman Mailer

The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer

The Castle in the Forest

Norman Mailer

The Castle in the Forest

Norman Mailer

Tough Guys Don't Dance

Norman Mailer

The Armies of the Night

Norman Mailer

The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer

Ancient Evenings

Norman Mailer

Oswald's Tale

Norman Mailer

Ancient Evenings

Norman Mailer

The Spooky Art

Norman Mailer

An American Dream

Norman Mailer

Harlot's Ghost

Norman Mailer

Harlot's Ghost

Norman Mailer

The Gospel According to the Son

Norman Mailer

Harlot's Ghost

Norman Mailer

Oswald's Tale

Norman Mailer

The Castle in the Forest

Norman Mailer

Harlot's Ghost