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Best Selling Books by Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer is the author of Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1997), The Prisoner of Sex (1971), On God (2008), Norman Mailer. Moonfire. 50th Anniversary Edition (2019), Mailer/Stern, Monroe (2022).

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Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

release date: Jan 01, 1997
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
The author sets out to capture Picasso''s early life in this biography, exploring the originality of his art and ambition. At the heart of the interpretation is Picasso''s first great love, Fernande Olivier, with whom the artist lived for seven years - a period which included his most revolutionary works. Fernande is given her own voice by way of excerpts from her candid memoirs. Including the artist''s friendships with Apollonaire and Gertrude Stein, the book evokes the atmosphere of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1900s.

The Prisoner of Sex

The Prisoner of Sex
"Disingenuously shocked to find himself cast by Women''s Lib as the archetypal male chauvinist pig, Mailer takes on Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970) and her sister furies. He wins hands down as literary tribune for Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence, rescued from Millett''s scissors-and-paste butchery though hardly exonerated despite the "barbaric yawp of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female of the universe." Mailer himself doesn''t yawp; he is ready and willing to be contrite; he will buy the groceries and wash dishes, the double standard is indeed noxious, and women ought of course to be allowed self-expression. But. . . honesty compels him to avow his own mystical adoration of femaleness. Deftly, he turns the table on the ''liberal technologist'' ''Left totalitarian'' ladies of the movement: Masters and Johnson, plastic dildoes, genetic engineering are signposts on the way to the "loss of sex polarity" -- this to the Prisoner represents the true dehumanization and heaven help us all..."--Kirkus

On God

release date: Nov 04, 2008
On God
“I see God,” wrote Norman Mailer, “as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks.” In these moving, amusing, and probing dialogues conducted in the years before his death, Mailer establishes his own system of belief, rejecting both organized religion and atheism. He avows that sensual pleasures were bestowed on us by God; he finds fault with the Ten Commandments; and he holds that technology was the Devil’s most brilliant creation. In short, Mailer is original and unpredictable in this inspiring journey, in which “God needs us as much as we need God.” Praise for On God “[Norman Mailer’s] theology is not theoretical to him. After eight decades, it is what he believes. He expects no adherents, and does not profess to be a prophet, but he has worked to forge his beliefs into a coherent catechism.”—New York “The glory of an original mind in full provocation.”—USA Today “At once illuminating and exciting . . . a chance to see Mailer’s intellect as well as his lively conversational style of speech.”—American Jewish Life “Remarkable . . . [Mailer’s] a believer—in his own fashion. . . . He has made [God] into a complex character.”—The Globe and Mail 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

Norman Mailer. Moonfire. 50th Anniversary Edition

release date: Jan 01, 2019
Norman Mailer. Moonfire. 50th Anniversary Edition
On July 20, 1969, science fiction became reality. Revisit the momentous moon landing in the 50th anniversary edition of Norman Mailer''s classic book on the Apollo 11 mission. This volume includes hundreds of images sourced from the NASA vaults, magazine archives, and private collections, documenting the lead up to, aftermath, and breathtaking...

Mailer/Stern, Monroe

release date: Jul 11, 2022
Mailer/Stern, Monroe
Bert Stern''s "Last Sitting" photographs of Marilyn Monroe enter a dialogue with Norman Mailer''s rigorous biography of the actress in this virtuoso publication. The fusion of image and text makes for an intimate portrait of an infamously enigmatic woman; a celebrity who shone even in tragedy. In this bold synthesis of literary classic and...

A Transit to Narcissus

A Transit to Narcissus
The first publication of a novel Mailer wrote at the age of 20, three years before he began work on The Naked and the Dead. Issued in an edition of 1,000 copies.

St. George and the Godfather

St. George and the Godfather
Inside look at Republican & Democratic presidential nominating conventions of 1972.

Barbary Shore

release date: Jan 01, 1998
Barbary Shore
At the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer proved his audacity by writing a novel about Socialism, a book that is at once an elegy and an indictment, sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. BARBARY SHORE features a cast of people in a Brooklyn boarding house caught up in a spiral of domestic violence and raw emotion. Mike Lovett is a writer living among them, searching for a subject to write about and an identity to replace the one he lost to shell-shock and amnesia fighting the Nazis. Out of his efforts to make sense of the extraordinary behaviour of those around him, Lovett adopts an unexpected allegiance and inherits a forceful political personality... one that is capable of confronting the re-emergence of totalitarian regimes and the global conflicts they generate.

The Essential Mailer

The Essential Mailer
Et udvalg af noveller fra samlingen: The short fiction of Norman Mailer, og et udvalg af faglitterære artikler fra samlingen: Existential errands

The Gospel According to the Son

release date: May 11, 1999
The Gospel According to the Son
A novel of the life of Jesus, this highly readable account tells of a man thrust forward by the visions he receives, the sermons he offers, and the miracles he enacts--until he comes to the apocalyptic end of his powers. "Bold . . . daring."--"New York Times Book Review."

Tough Guys Don't Dance

Tough Guys Don't Dance
Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male in a brilliant crime novel that transcends genre. When Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer living on Cape Cod, awakes with a gruesome hangover, a painful tattoo on his upper arm, and a severed female head in his marijuana stash, he has almost no memory of the night before. As he reconstructs the missing hours, Madden runs afoul of retired prizefighters, sex addicts, mediums, former cons, a world-weary ex-girlfriend, and his own father, old now but still a Herculean figure. Stunningly conceived and vividly composed, "Tough Guys Don''t Dance "represents Mailer at the peak of his powers. Praise for "Tough Guys Don''t Dance" " " "Spectacular . . . Norman Mailer] makes every word count, like a master knife thrower zinging stilettos in a circle around your head."--"People" "As brash, brooding and ultimately mesmerizing as the author himself . . . Mailer strikes a] dazzling balance between humor and horror."--New York "Daily News" " " "A first-rate page-turner of a murder mystery . . . full of great characters, littered with dead bodies and replete with plausible suspects."--"Chicago Tribune" " " " "Tough Guys Don''t Dance"] has that charming Mailer bravado."--"The New York Times" 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" "From the Paperback edition."
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