PDF Ebook An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer
Thinking about guide An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer to check out is likewise required. You could pick the book based on the favourite motifs that you like. It will engage you to enjoy reading other publications An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer It can be additionally regarding the necessity that obliges you to check out the book. As this An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer, you can find it as your reading book, even your favourite reading book. So, find your preferred publication right here and also obtain the link to download guide soft file.
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer
PDF Ebook An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer
An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer. Let's check out! We will certainly often discover this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mommy made use of to buy us to consistently review, so did the educator. Some books An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer are completely read in a week and also we need the responsibility to assist reading An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer Just what about now? Do you still like reading? Is reading simply for you which have obligation? Not! We below offer you a new e-book entitled An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer to check out.
Here, we have many e-book An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer and also collections to review. We additionally serve alternative kinds and sort of guides to search. The fun publication, fiction, past history, novel, scientific research, and also other sorts of e-books are offered right here. As this An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer, it turneds into one of the preferred e-book An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer collections that we have. This is why you are in the right website to view the outstanding e-books to own.
It won't take more time to download this An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer It will not take more money to publish this book An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer Nowadays, people have been so smart to utilize the modern technology. Why don't you use your gizmo or other gadget to save this downloaded and install soft file e-book An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer In this manner will certainly let you to constantly be gone along with by this e-book An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer Naturally, it will be the very best buddy if you review this e-book An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer up until completed.
Be the first to download this publication now and get all reasons you require to read this An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer Guide An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer is not simply for your tasks or need in your life. Books will consistently be a buddy in each time you review. Now, allow the others understand for this page. You could take the perks and discuss it also for your close friends and individuals around you. By in this manner, you could truly get the significance of this publication An American Dream: A Novel, By Norman Mailer beneficially. Just what do you think for our suggestion below?
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
“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
“A work of fierce concentration . . . perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic [with] a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity.”—Harper’s
“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
- Sales Rank: #515467 in Books
- Brand: Mailer, Norman
- Published on: 2015-02-17
- Released on: 2015-02-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.30" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review
Praise for An American Dream
“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
“A work of fierce concentration . . . perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic [with] a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity.”—Harper’s
“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
About the Author
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
44 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
Dark Genius
By Ted Burke
Mailer's meditation on violence and evil will not be every one's idea of a good novel to read on the beach, but An American Dream is a fully realized male fantasy wherein one set-upon, White, alcoholic, protagonist berserks himself into sequential delirium fueled rages to rid himself of the crushing banality of the culture that he feels is killing him by the inch. To do this, he commits a series of violent and insane acts, in an alcoholic haze; challenges sent him by the moon (really) whose successful completion might give him a hint of the freedom he dreams is beyond the neon-lit tarp of the Manhattan skyline. This pilgrim's progress is nothing short of an obscene fantasy, wherein our hero, a decorated war hero, former congressman and talk show host, strangles his maddening estranged wife, buggers the German maid, steals a Mafia Don's girl friend, and proceeds, in 24 hours, to lie and deceive the New York City Police Department, the Mob, with intimations that the FBI and CIA are involved invisibly in the mess he created. The plot, of course, is lurid, absurd and the product of a particular time, but Mailer's novel comes at a time when the Hemingway cult of quiet, a manly stoicism managed through a singular, privately held code of honor, was exhausted of compelling narrative potential. Mailer's idea was to see what would happen if the man who might have been the Hemingway hero, suffering his hurts in some poetic privacy, have instead a psychotic break.
Gone, we see, is the hard-carved minimalism of the Hemingway style, with Mailer offering a delirious metaphorical ride through the ugly side of individual realization. His character, Stephen Rozack, is akin to King Lear in the rain, gone insane precisely because he no longer has the staging guiding his eye and thinking. In the clutch of his tantrums, the world finally seems to pull back its shroud and reveal the shape and purring function of its true nature; Rozack sees cities of diamonds, rains of falling stars, he smells and tastes those things never served on a plate. Mailer's great chains of metaphors deliver a dissolving sensibility that sees, fleetingly, the way everything is connected ,the hand of an anonymous God directing His actors in ways unannounced and never explained. Rid of the props and story lines, there is nothing left, an emptiness that can only be filled with increasing amounts of destruction. This is a riveting, wild, and enthralling exploration into the romanticizing of prescriptive violence. Troubling, agitated, problematic for great numbers of readers, a brilliant novel despite its flaws. It may be even because of the flaws--the unreal dialogue, the haphazard cramming of a week's worth of events into a single 24 hour period--that bring the long runs of sentences shriek and burn so splendidly, as there is the sense Rojack's state is a dream within which he must confront and conquer every blatant and disguised dread. The crash and slam of the plot dynamics--bear in mind that there is very little slack space here where one is allowed to rest and gather their wits in the midst of this ludicrous plot--get an intensity of feeling just right, that the world and the things in it are crushing down upon you, and your only option in the delirium is to obey the first fleeting voice that commands to respond, attack, destroy that which is killing you by the psychic inch. Mailer had written in his infamous essay "The White Negro" that it was one's moral responsibility to "encourage the psychopath within oneself" so to be able to experience greater and more expansive perceptions, to generate a new knowledge violently dislodged from murderous conformism. In An American Dream, he conducts a fictional field study of his theory by setting it loose in the plot of a novel, and the results are exhilarating as they are nearly unspeakable. Tom Wolfe, I remember, was not a fan of the novel, suggesting in a review that Mailer "lards up" his prose with too many allusions, metaphors and similes when he ought to have taken a hint from James M.Cain and fashioned a terser, blunter style.
He used Mailer's running metaphor of boxing and compared him to a fighter who needed to get out of his corner faster. I differ with Wolfe's conclusions and tend to agree with the late critic Richard Poirier's reading of the novel, which considered "An American Dream" a compelling delirium of language styles fused together, the elegant, the surreal, the jazzy and slang-infested, the terse and the verbose, in a spectacular, intoxicating sweep. The point of the novel was to reveal Stephen Rozack's festering self-doubt despite his nominal accomplishments as both war hero and media figure, and his deranged attempts to save what he considers his soul. Mailer's novel is an interior view of a break down, an interiorized version of Lear's final speech. A reader who might be intrigued by Mailer's fictional realization of his existential anti-hero/hipster/White Negro wouldn't be wrong to think that the author himself is disturbed by the furthest reach of his imaginative takes on the purgative value of sudden and decisive violence. Indeed, from this point on, Mailer's ideas about violence and power come with more caution, nuance, and in a brilliant turn to begin his moral argument about the cause of aggression in the culture, he penned his brief, obscene and fantastically incandescent novel Why Are We In Viet Nam: if Stephen Rojack was the result of an psychically emasculated man given in to floating voices and lunar impulses in the wan hope of being delivered from what is killing him by the inch, only to become only a more complicated expression of those mechanisms that generate the larger , global evil, Why Are We in Viet Nam? takes the more expansive view. The question isn't answered, nor is Viet Nam even mentioned until the last page of the book, yet by the time you reach the end of this brief and ingeniously offered account of an Alaskan bear hunt, we've gone through something primordial, a cultural conditioning that produces a need for violence at the most rudimentary level of the culture.
Mailer's habit of romanticizing violence and macho performances ends with this second book, and the serious shift into the causes, conditions of our troubles begins in earnest, leading Mailer through a fantastic series of novels and nonfiction. He dared what other literary writers only feigned and actively engaged the world in ways and manners that he thought would make reality surrender some of its secrets. The hope, of course, would be that he might be able to change the way men and women viewed themselves in a political reality that had stripped the individual of all creative drive, and hence empower them to change the substance of their world. Grand ambition, yes, and a failed enterprise, but in the attempt are left a string of brilliant books -- The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song, Why are We In Viet Nam, Armies of the Night, An American Dream, Harlot's Ghost, -- that, among others, form a body of work at once daring, daunting, vain and arrogant, preening, breathtakingly on target, raunchy, clipped, rich and rolling and lyrical like the grandest music. An infuriating writer, yes, but even so one who's work stands tall in the era in which he wrote.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Nightmarish read
By scott gates
This is my first Mailer novel and i was worried that it would be boring and journalistic. But I was hugely surprised at how bizzare and subjective the imagery was - imagery which seizes upon the mind almost violently. The world of Stephen Rojack is drunken, amoral, and continually teetering between the shadowy, nightmarish underworld, and the respectable day to day world. This book in many ways does read as some awful dream, a dream in which the moon speaks to you, the ledge outside begs to be walked on as a test of courage, and murder is seen as some type of primitive, sexual release. Being somewhat sentimental I can only like a novel like this so much (I did not become attached to the characters, or want to immerse myself in the world of this novel), but that does not take away from the fact that this is a really enjoyable novel, even though I was almost relieved when I was finished. This book is like when you have an awful nightmare that keeps you up all night, and even though the nighmare terrified you, you cant help thinking about how interesting the images and mental landscape of the dream was. That being said I am definitely looking forward to more Mailer because he obviously has original talent.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A wonderfully sick satire.
By E. Steven Fried
I had two expectations of this book that bore no fruit. An english teacher I had at Columbia described the plot in such a manner as to make one feel the protagonist would be such a repulsive character as to be unfollowable and several postings on this site suggested that the narrative would be so congested with stream-of-consciousness discourse as to be unreadable. Well, Stephen Rojack may be a wife murdering, hard drinking, womanizing, sodomite, but he's the most charming character in the book and the manner in which he conveys his thoughts couldn't be more lucid and engaging than Philip Marlowe. This is a very consciously pulp novel that plays on comic book and hollywood conventions, a satirical nightmare that shouldn't be taken any more as fact than Hunter Thompson's maniacal binges in Las Vegas. The best way to imagine this book is to picture it as a stark, contrasty b+w movie directed by Stanley Kubrick from a script by Terry Southern. Sterling Hayden would be in the lead role and Liz Taylor would be the wife with Angie Dickinson as Cherry and Sammy Davis Junior as Shago and Lynn Redgrave as Ruta.
See all 41 customer reviews...
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer PDF
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer EPub
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer Doc
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer iBooks
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer rtf
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer Mobipocket
An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer Kindle
> PDF Ebook An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer Doc
> PDF Ebook An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer Doc
> PDF Ebook An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer Doc
> PDF Ebook An American Dream: A Novel, by Norman Mailer Doc
