Audiobooks by Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore now in audio.Arguably the greatest book from America's most heroically ambitious writer, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. And that fight for the right to die is what made him famous.Mailer tells not only Gilmore's story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement-impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

Norman Mailer (Author), Maxwell Hamilton (Narrator)

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The Castle in the Forest

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.

Norman Mailer (Author), Malcolm Hillgartner (Narrator)

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The Grace Awakening

Maybe you’ve known about grace for years. You grew up with it. You heard about it from the pulpits, in Bible classes, from radio and TV preachers. But maybe there’s more to grace than they told you. Yes, it’s God’s 'unmerited favor to lost sinners,' but did anyone tell you how grace can change you? How it can revolutionize the way you live? Grace can give you freedom. Freedom to be creative, spontaneous. Freedom to think outside the box. Grace can make you want to know God, to be close to Him. Grace can cure your fears, improve your outlook, help you look at life through the lens of joy rather than the fog of pessimism. Grace can strengthen your relationships, giving you freedom to be yourself - and freedom to let others be themselves - without feeling a need to judge, control, or manipulate one another. And yes, grace is God’s incredible gift to each of us that shows His love daily in overflowing measures, giving us reason for hope and joy. For the growing number of people who feel that there should be something more to their walk with God than the sometimes grim face of religion, The Grace Awakening offers a glorious alternative: the truth that sets us free.

Norman Mailer (Author), Richard Fredricks, Tom Parks (Narrator)

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Of a Fire on the Moon

For many, the moon landing was the defining event of the twentieth century. So it seems only fitting that Norman Mailer-the literary provocateur who altered the landscape of American nonfiction-wrote the most wide-ranging, far-seeing history of the Apollo 11 mission. A classic chronicle of America's reach for greatness in the midst of the Cold War, Of a Fire on the Moon compiles the reportage Mailer published between 1969 and 1970 in Life magazine: gripping firsthand dispatches from inside NASA's clandestine operations in Houston and Cape Kennedy; technical insights into the mag¬nitude of their awe-inspiring feat; and prescient meditations that place the event in human context as only Mailer could. "Mailer's account of Apollo 11 stands as a stunning image of human energy and purposefulness.... It is an act of revelation-the only verbal deed to be worthy of the dream and the reality it celebrates." -Saturday Review "A wild and dazzling book." -The New York Times Book Review "Still the most challenging and stimulating account of [the] mission to appear in print." -The Washington Post

Norman Mailer (Author), MacLeod Andrews (Narrator)

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Selected Letters of Norman Mailer

Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 40 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific-or more exposed-than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence. Now the best of these are published here in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Compiled by Mailer's authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer's missives from 1940 to 2007-letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers, including Truman Capote and James Baldwin, to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky. Together these letters form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. "The shards and winks at Mailer's own past that are scattered throughout the letters-the stories of friendships and of family, of his identity-forming relationship with his mother and his 'Victorian childhood' surrounded by loving women, of his street-corner adolescence and his erotic and literary awakening...are so tantalizing. They glitter throughout like unrefined jewels that Mailer took to the grave." -The New Yorker "Umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate." -The New York Times "Indispensable...a subtle document of an unsubtle man's wit and erudition, even (or especially) when it's wielded as a weapon." -New York

Norman Mailer (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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Tough Guys Don't Dance

Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the mod¬ern 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 recon-structs 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. "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

Norman Mailer (Author), MacLeod Andrews (Narrator)

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Advertisements for Myself

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.

Norman Mailer (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

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Why Are We at War?

Beginning with his debut masterpiece, The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer has repeatedly told the truth about war. Why Are We at War? returns Mailer to the gravity of the battlefield and the grand hubris of the politicians who send soldiers there to die. First published in the early days of the Iraq War, Why Are We at War? is an explosive argument about the American quest for empire that still carries weight today. Scrutinizing the Bush administration's words and actions, Mailer unleashes his trademark moral rigor: "Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered.... To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad."

Norman Mailer (Author), Norman Mailer (Narrator)

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The Big Empty

Questions are posed,” writes Norman Mailer, “in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions.” In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years.Their wide-ranging discussions take place over the course of a year, beginning in July 2004. Set against the backdrop of George W. Bush’s re-election campaign and the war in Iraq, each considers what it means to live in America today. John asks his father to look back to World War II, and explore the parallels that can—and cannot—be drawn between that time and our current post-9/11 consciousness. As their conversations develop, the topics shift from the political to the personal to the political again, as they duck and weave around one another. They explore their shared admiration of boxing and poker, the nature of marriage and love, television, movies, writing, and what it means to be a part of this extraordinary family.

John Buffalo Mailer, Norman Mailer (Author), John Buffalo Mailer, Stephen Mailer (Narrator)

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Mind of an Outlaw

Norman Mailer was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American letters and an acknowledged master of the essay. Mind of an Outlaw, the first posthumous publication from this outsize literary icon, collects Mailer's most important and representative work in the form that many rank as his most electrifying. As America's foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life - on the airwaves and in print - for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics. Here is Mailer on boxing, Mailer on Hemingway, Mailer on Marilyn Monroe, and, of course, Mailer on Mailer - the one subject that served as the beating heart of all of his nonfiction. From his early essay "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 seminal collection Advertisements for Myself; and a never-before-published essay on Sigmund Freud. Incendiary, erudite, and unrepentantly outrageous, Norman Mailer was a dominating force on the battlefield of ideas. Featuring an incisive Introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Mind of an Outlaw forms a fascinating portrait of Mailer's intellectual development across the span of his career as well as the preoccupations of a nation in the last half of the American century.

Norman Mailer (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

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Why Are We in Vietnam?

When Why Are We in Vietnam? was published in 1967, almost twenty years after The Naked and the Dead, the critical response was ecstatic. The novel fully confirmed Mailer''s stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality. Narrated by Ranald ("D.J.") Jethroe, Texas''s most precocious teenager, on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam, this story of a hunting trip in Alaska is both brilliantly entertaining and profoundly thoughtful. "Touchdown! Knockout! . . . A brilliant piece of writing." -Newsweek "It is impossible to walk away from this novel without being sharply reminded of the fact that Norman Mailer is a writer of extraordinary ability." ?Chicago Tribune "A book of great integrity. All the odd qualities are here: Mailer''s remarkable feeling for the sensory event, the detail, ''the way it was,'' his power and energy." ?The New York Review of Books "A shattering social commentary . . . The book is a tour de force, a treatise on human nature, society, and war in flip disguise." ?Dallas News

Norman Mailer (Author), MacLeod Andrews (Narrator)

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Barbary Shore

Published at the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer's audacious novel of socialism is at once an elegy and an indictment, a sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: one betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner. Combining Kafkaesque unease with Orwellian paranoia, Barbary Shore plays havoc with our certainties and delivers its effects with a force that is pure Mailer.

Norman Mailer (Author), MacLeod Andrews (Narrator)

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