Get Free Ebook An American Dream, by Norman Mailer
However, just how is the method to get this book An American Dream, By Norman Mailer Still perplexed? It does not matter. You can take pleasure in reading this book An American Dream, By Norman Mailer by on-line or soft data. Just download the publication An American Dream, By Norman Mailer in the web link provided to go to. You will certainly obtain this An American Dream, By Norman Mailer by online. After downloading and install, you can save the soft file in your computer or device. So, it will certainly ease you to review this e-book An American Dream, By Norman Mailer in particular time or location. It might be unsure to delight in reviewing this publication An American Dream, By Norman Mailer, because you have bunches of work. However, with this soft documents, you could take pleasure in reading in the leisure even in the voids of your works in workplace.
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer
Get Free Ebook An American Dream, by Norman Mailer
An American Dream, By Norman Mailer. The industrialized technology, nowadays assist every little thing the human demands. It includes the daily activities, tasks, office, entertainment, and also much more. Among them is the terrific web connection and also computer system. This condition will certainly alleviate you to sustain one of your pastimes, reading practice. So, do you have prepared to read this publication An American Dream, By Norman Mailer now?
If you ally require such a referred An American Dream, By Norman Mailer publication that will provide you worth, obtain the very best seller from us now from lots of prominent authors. If you want to enjoyable publications, several stories, story, jokes, and also much more fictions compilations are likewise launched, from best seller to the most current launched. You could not be perplexed to appreciate all book collections An American Dream, By Norman Mailer that we will certainly provide. It is not concerning the rates. It has to do with just what you need currently. This An American Dream, By Norman Mailer, as one of the very best sellers right here will certainly be among the appropriate choices to review.
Locating the ideal An American Dream, By Norman Mailer publication as the ideal requirement is sort of good lucks to have. To start your day or to finish your day at night, this An American Dream, By Norman Mailer will be proper sufficient. You can simply search for the tile right here and also you will certainly obtain guide An American Dream, By Norman Mailer referred. It will certainly not bother you to reduce your valuable time to opt for buying book in store. By doing this, you will certainly also invest money to spend for transportation and other time spent.
By downloading and install the on the internet An American Dream, By Norman Mailer book here, you will certainly get some benefits not to go with the book shop. Just attach to the internet and also start to download and install the page link we discuss. Currently, your An American Dream, By Norman Mailer prepares to appreciate reading. This is your time and also your serenity to obtain all that you really want from this book An American Dream, By Norman Mailer
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.
- Sales Rank: #379869 in Books
- Published on: 1999-05-04
- Released on: 1999-05-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .59" w x 5.14" l, .52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review
"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talents." —The New Yorker"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
About the Author
Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner's Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot's Ghost; Oswald's Tale; The Gospel According to the Son, The Castle and the Forest and On God. He died in 2007.
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.
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer PDF
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer EPub
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer Doc
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer iBooks
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer rtf
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer Mobipocket
An American Dream, by Norman Mailer Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment