"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

"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.

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"

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.

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.

A time for greatness: Norman Mailer s game-changing coverage of John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign With his Hollywood good looks, boundless enthusiasm, and mesmeric media presence, John F. Kennedy was destined to capture the imaginations of the more than 70 million Americans who watched the nation s first televised presidential debate. Just days after beating out Richard Nixon by the narrowest margin in history, Kennedy himself said, It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide. But one man begged to differ: writer Norman Mailer, who bragged that his pro-Kennedy treatise, Superman Comes to the Supermarket, had won the election for Kennedy. Whether or not that was the case, the article, published in Esquire magazine just weeks before polls opened, did redefine political reporting and New Journalism with Mailer's frank, first-person voice identifying Kennedy as the existential hero who could awaken the nation from its postwar slumber and conformist Eisenhower years. Now, TASCHEN reimagines this no-holds-barred portrait of one of America s most revered presidents on his path to the White House, publishing Mailer s essay in book form with over 300 photographs that bring the campaign and the candidate s family to life. These images were captured by some of the great photojournalists of the day Cornell Capa, Jacques Lowe, Paul Schutzer, Stanley Tretick, Hank Walker and appear in this volume alongside many never-before-published photos by Garry Winogrand and Burton Berinsky, providing a fascinating look at the man who declared the 60s a time for greatness. "

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 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

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.

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.

"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

One of the first examples of "new journalism" daringly combines reportage with a novelistic style and garnered Mailer his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1968.

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.

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.

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.

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"
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"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"
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"A work of fierce concentration . . . perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic with] a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity."--"Harper's"
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"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"

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

Who was Adolf Hitler? It's a question writers have been trying to answer for more than sixty years. But after thousands of biographies, histories, novels, and films, many fundamental questions remain: How do we explain Hitler's hatred? Where did it come from? Could it happen again? Norman Mailer sets out to respond to these and other crucial aspects of Hitler's personality in his compulsively readable new novel. Spanning three generations, and a hundred years of history, the book brings to life the Hitlers ? grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and, ultimately, young Adolf ? in an energetic and wildly entertaining family saga. Mailer recounts the marriages, incestuous couplings, estrangements, afflictions, and deaths that lead to the birth of young Adolf in 1889. Told in the voice of a mysterious (and unreliable) narrator, this playful yet profound novel blends fact and fiction in a stirring family tale that will cause the reader to re-examine his preconceived ideas about Hitler and the nature of his evil.

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.