An American Dream, Norman Mailer
An American Dream, Norman Mailer
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An American Dream

Author: Norman Mailer

Narrator: Christopher Lane

Unabridged: 9 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 08/23/2016


Synopsis

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.

About Norman Mailer

Born in Long Branch, NJ, in 1923, and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the 20th 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on July 27, 2024

“Twenty five whores in the room next door, twenty five floors and I need more…” Sisters of Mercy – Vision Thing. If there are dreams then, according to the law of opposites, there should be counterdreams… Can reality be considered as a counterdream? Or is it paranoia? Norman Mailer suggests a poisonou......more

Goodreads review by Baba on July 30, 2022

2020 view: So reading this 15 years after reading it the first time, nothing changes from what I wrote below (in 2005) bar that I should mention he throws in a lot of 1960s New Age nonsense about moons, totems, dreams etc. oh, and that it is even more misogynistic than I remembered! It's because of......more

Goodreads review by Ian on September 06, 2016

Serial Reading and Writing I re-read this novel straight after “The Deer Park”, so I could compare two successive Mailer novels, even though ten years separated them. “An American Dream” is a much more tightly structured novel. It’s not as discursive as “The Deer Park”. Instead, it’s divided into eigh......more