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"
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"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"
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"A narrative of tremendous energy and panache; the author at the top of his form."--Christopher Hitchens, "Financial Times"
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"The performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity."--Martin Amis, "The Sunday Times "(London)
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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"

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.

"The Faith is the bible of graffiti. It forever captures the place, the time, and the writings of those of us who made it happen." --Snake I

In 1973, author Norman Mailer teamed with photographer Jon Naar to produce The Faith of Graffiti, a fearless exploration of the birth of the street art movement in New York City. The book coupled Mailer's essay on the origins and importance of graffiti in modern urban culture with Naar's radiant, arresting photographs of the young graffiti writers' work. The result was a powerful, impressionistic account of artistic ferment on the streets of a troubled and changing city--and an iconic documentary record of a critical body of work now largely lost to history.

This new edition of The Faith of Graffiti, the first in more than three decades, brings this vibrant work--the seminal document on the origins of street art--to contemporary readers. Photographer Jon Naar has enhanced the original with thirty-two pages of additional photographs that are new to this edition, along with an afterword in which he reflects on the project and the meaning it has taken on in the intervening decades. It stands now, as it did then, as a rich survey of a group of outsider artists and the body of work they created--and a provocative defense of a generation that questioned the bounds of authority over aesthetics.

"This book is really two books. It is a biography, and it is also a pictorial retrospective of an actress whose greatest love affair was conceivably with the camera," wrote Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography, Marilyn. Now TASCHEN has paired Mailer's original text with Bert Stern's photographs from the legendary Last Sitting-widely considered the most intimate photographs of Monroe ever taken-to create a fitting tribute to the woman who, at the time of her death in 1962, was the world's most famous, a symbol of glamour and eroticism for an entire generation. But though she was feted and adored by her public, her private life was that of a little girl lost, desperate to find love and security. Mailer's Marilyn is beautiful, tragic, and complex. As Mailer reflects upon her life-from her bleak childhood through to the mysterious circumstances of her death-she emerges as a symbol of the bizarre decade during which she reigned as Hollywood's greatest female star. This book, conceived by Lawrence Schiller, Mailer's collaborator on five works, combines the author's masterful text with Stern's penetrating images of the 36-year-old Marilyn. Photographed for Vogue magazine over three days at the Bel-Air Hotel, Marilyn had never allowed such unfettered access, nor had she looked so breathtakingly beautiful. Six weeks later, mysteriously, she was dead. In this bold synthesis of literary classic and legendary portrait-sitting, Mailer and Stern lift the veils of confusion surrounding Monroe-the woman, the star, the sex symbol-and offer profound insight into an iconic figure whose true personality remains an enigma even today.

One of the finest American novels ever written, Norman Mailer's classic account of the Philippines campaign of WW2.

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.

About the author

Michael Mann's biopic Ali starring Will Smith, Jon Voight and Jamie Foxx opens on general release in January 2002. Read more about Muhammad Ali in the Penguin Modern Classic The Fight.

With the real Muhammed Ali involved in the filmmaking, Ali takes us straight into the heart of the ring, the strategy sessions and straight into the mind and body of the man. Will Smith trained for a year before filming, transforming himself from a 185 pound actor to a 220 pound athlete.

Norman Mailer's The Fight focuses on the 1975 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.

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.

"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

The Cinema of Norman Mailer: Film is Like Death not only examines the enfant terrible writer's thoughts on cinema, but also features interviews with Norman Mailer himself. The Cinema of Norman Mailer also explores Mailer's cinema through previously published and newly commissioned essays written by an array of film and literary scholars, enthusiasts, and those with a personal, philosophical connection to Mailer. This volume discusses the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and filmmaker's six films created during the years of 1947 and 1987, and contends to show how Mailer's films can be best read as cinematic delineations that visually represent many of the writer's metaphysical and ontological concerns and ideas that appear in his texts from the 1950s until his passing in 2007. By re-examining Mailer's cinema through these new perspectives, one may be awarded not just a deeper understanding of Mailer's desire to make films, but also find a new, alternative vision of Mailer himself. Norman Mailer was not just a writer, but more: he was one of the most influential Postmodern artists of the twentieth century with deep roots in the cinema. He allowed the cinema to not only influence his aesthetic approach, but sanctioned it as his easiest-crafted analogy for exploring sociological imagination in his writing. Mailer once suggested, "Film is legitimately more interesting than books..." and with that in mind, readers of Norman Mailer might begin to rethink his oeuvre through the viewfinder of the film medium, as he was equally as passionate about working within cinema as he was about literature itself.

The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler's parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the twentieth century, Mailer's novel""delivers myriad twists and surprises along with characteristically astonishing insights into the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.
Praise for "The Castle in the Forest"
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"This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer's most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien. . . . Mailer doesn't inhabit these historical figures so much as possess them."--"The New York Times Book Review"
"Terrifically creepy . . . an icy and convincing portrait of the dictator as a young sociopath."--"Entertainment Weekly"
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"The work of a bold and confident writer who may yet be seen as the preeminent novelist of our time . . . a source of tremendous narrative pleasure . . . Every character . . . lives and breathes."--South Florida "Sun-Sentinel"
"Blackly hilarious, beautifully written . . . "The Castle in the Forest"] has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit."--"The New York Observer"
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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 Hardcover edition."

A Real Life BDSM Memoir: Laura, 27, lingerie model whoring in a fancy bordello to pay off her husband's gambling debt meets Jeffrey, 33, Apple Records media wizard and creator of the celebrated sex magazine, Puritan, and so begins this true shameless hilarious erotic cyclone. "Funny, salacious, perversely-dare I say it? Uplifting " From the Foreword bequeathed by Norman Mailer "One of the best non-fiction works I've ever read." From the Introduction by Legs McNeil

On October 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the virtual center of Africa, two boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to confront each other in an epic match. One was Muhammad Ali, who vowed to reclaim the championship he had lost. The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble and who kept his hands in his pockets "the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case." Observing them both was Norman Mailer, whose grasp of the titanic battle's feints and stratagems-and sensitivity to their deeper symbolism-made his 1975 book The Fight a masterpiece of sportswriting. Whether analyzing the fighters' moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer was a commentator of unparalleled acumen-and surely one of the few intrepid enough to accompany Ali on a late-night run through the bush. Through The Fight he restores our tarnished notions of heroism to a blinding gleam, and establishes himself as a champion in his own right. Over four decades after its original publication, this edition of The Fight has been introduced and abridged by Mailer scholar J. Michael Lennon and illustrated for the first time with principal photography by the two men who captured Ali and Foreman in the ring and in private like no one else: Neil Leifer and Howard L. Bingham. Widely considered to be the greatest sports photographer of his generation, Neil Leifer's vibrant color coverage dominates from ringside. It also serves as a living testimony to the pageantry, sheer physical power, and deep psychological interplay of the fighters, their camps, and their controversial host, Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Howard Bingham was Ali's constant companion, documenting his every move from the moment he stepped off the plane in Zaire, his daily training regime, right through to the dressing room tension as he prepared to face Foreman once and for all. Together with pictures from other photojournalists, reproductions of Mailer's original manuscript pages, and additional visual documentation of the media frenzy surrounding the "Rumble in the Jungle," the result is a dazzling tribute to The Champ and a vivid document of one of the most epic, adrenaline-laced events in sporting history.

Writers have long been attracted to boxing. Hemingway, Mailer, Algren, Plimpton, Oates, and many others have stepped into the ring--at least in spirit--to give voice to an otherwise wordless sport, to celebrate that "sweet science," and to bear witness to its romance and tragedy. In this acclaimed book, hailed by Norman Mailer as an "impressive event," we are brought for the first time into the ring for a close-up look at the "manly art" through the eyes of Jose Torres, a man who was a great boxer himself. When former light-heavyweight world champion Torres traded in his gloves for a typewriter, boxing finally found its eyewitness.
In the classic "Sting Like a Bee," Torres turns his well-trained eye on one of the most celebrated and controversial athletes of all time: Muhammad Ali. In this penetrating view of Ali and the world of prizefighting, told by a true insider and "boxing's Renaissance man," Torres delivers exciting and explicit accounts of all of Ali's major fights with the cool authenticity of one who has lived it.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW O'HAGAN In the summer of 1976 Gary Gilmore robbed two men. Then he shot them in cold blood. For those murders Gilmore was sent to languish on Death Row - and could confidently expect his sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. In America, no one had been executed for ten years. But Gary Gilmore wanted to die, and his ensuing battle with the authorities for the right to do so made him into a world-wide celebrity - and ensured that his execution turned into the most gruesome media event of the decade.

Consagrado ya como uno de las grandes patriarcas de la literatura norteamericana contemporanea, Mailer sera, sin embargo, genio y figura hasta el fin, y la vejez no ha atemperado su espiritu iconoclasta y combativo, ni su capacidad para sorprender al lector. En esta novela, publicada en 1955 y uno de sus titulos mas misticos, Mailer se propuso, segun sus propias palabras, escribir una novela sobre el sexo. Pero el sexo entendido como la ultima frontera de la literatura aun no explorada enteramente, ni agotada, por los novelistas del siglo diecinueve y la primera mitad del veinte. Calificada tambien como una historia de amor y odio con Hollywood, pocas veces las grandezas y las miserias del mundo del cine y sus merodeadores han sido expuestas con tal desnudez, con tamana causticidad. B+Solo un escritor con el inmenso y subversivo talento de Norman Mailer podria haber escrito este libroB; (The New Yorker). Norman Mailer (New Jersey, 1923) es uno de los mayores escritores norteamericanos contemporaneos, asi como una figura central en el panorama cultural: novelista, director de cine, activista politico, aspirante a alcalde de Nueva York y enfant terrible todo terreno. Su primera novela, Los desnudos y los muertos, sobre la Segunda Guerra Mundial, lo catapulto a la fama. Despues ha publicado mas de veinte libros, entre novelas, reportajes y ensayos, con los que ha obtenido los mas prestigiosos premios literarios. Dos de ellos fueron galardonados con el Pulitzer, Los ejercitos de la noche (que obtuvo tambien el National Book Award) y La cancion del Verdugo, ambos publicados por Anagrama, al igual que Los tipos duros no bailan y El parque de los ciervos.

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.

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'

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.

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.

The definitive Norman Mailer collection, as he writes on Marilyn Monroe, culture, ideology, boxing, Hemingway, politics, sex, celebrity and - of course - Norman Mailer From 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.