Norman Mailer has 14 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 12 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 16 ratings. The most-rated is The Naked and the Dead.
The Naked and the Dead
Summary
Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer. Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.
©1951 Norman Mailer (P)2016 Brilliance Audio. All rights reserved.
The Executioner's Song
Summary
Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore now in a brand-new edition. 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.
©1980 Norman Mailer (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Fight
Summary
In 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaïre, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible "professor of boxing." The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble. Observing them was Norman Mailer, a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity. Whether he is analyzing the fighters' moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer's grasp of the titanic battle's feints and stratagems - and his sensitivity to their deeper symbolism - makes this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport.
©1975 Norman Mailer. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd. For permission to reprint an excerpt from The Palmwine Drunkard by Amos Tutuola (published by Faber and Faber Ltd. as The Palm Wine Drinkarct), © 1953 by George Braziller, © the Estate of Amos Tutuola. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Gospel According to the Son
Summary
Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ's story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressing it, "as if I were a man enclosing another man within." In its brevity and piercing simplicity, it may be Mailer's most accessible, direct, and heartfelt work.
©1997 Norman Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Castle in the Forest
Summary
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 20th 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.
©2007 Norman Mailer (P)2017 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Harlot's Ghost
Summary
With unprecedented scope and consummate skill, Norman Mailer unfolds a rich and riveting epic of an American spy. Harry Hubbard is the son and godson of CIA legends. His journey to learn the secrets of his society - and his own past - takes him through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the "momentous catastrophe" of the Kennedy assassination. All the while, Hubbard is haunted by women who were loved by both his godfather and President Kennedy. Featuring a tapestry of unforgettable characters both real and imagined, Harlot's Ghost is a panoramic achievement in the tradition of Tolstoy, Melville, and Balzac, a triumph of Mailer's literary prowess. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©1991 Norman Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: FABER AND FABER LIMITED: Five lines from “The Waste Land” from Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (pp. 27-28), © 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot. Rights throughout the world excluding the USA are controlled by Faber and Faber Limited. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited. THE NEW REPUBLIC: Excerpts from “Unofficial Envoy” by Jean Daniel, December 13, 1963, and excerpts from “When Castro Heard the News” by Jean Daniel, December 7, 1963. © 1963 by The New Republic, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The New Republic.
Of a Fire on the Moon
Summary
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 chronicle 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 magnitude of their awe-inspiring feat; and prescient meditations that place the event in human context as only Mailer could.
©1969, 1970 Norman Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Publishing, all rights reserved.
First Words
Summary
Most kids write stories. Only a few of them grow up to be successful authors. But before there was Carrie, there was Johnathan and the Witchs. And before there was Rabbit Angstrom, Toyota Dealer, there was Manuel Cirarro, famous detective. Could we have seen the seeds of success in Stephen King's and John Updike's juvenilia? Here is a funny and surprisingly informative gathering of childhood creations by today's most celebrated writers - those who are amused by and happy to share their own early efforts. These young writers are the same people who now dominate the best seller lists and occupy the most celebrate spots on bookshelves in our stores, libraries and homes. Authors include Margaret Atwood, Roy Blount Jr., Pat Conroy, Gail Godwin, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, Amy Tan, John Updike, Gore Vidal, and Paul Mandelbaum (editor).
©2009 Phoenix (P)2009 Phoenix
Tough Guys Don't Dance
Summary
Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern 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 reconstructs 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.
©1984 Norman Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, for permission to reprint "One's Neighbor's Wife" from Hugging the Shore by John Updike, copyright © 1983 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.
Ancient Evenings
Summary
Norman Mailer's dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel of ancient Egypt breathes life into the figures of a lost era: the eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh Rameses and his wife, Queen Nefertiti; Menenhetet, their creature, lover, and victim; and the gods and mortals that surround them in intimate and telepathic communion. Mailer's reincarnated protagonist is carried through the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile, and into the terrifying clash of battle. An extraordinary work of inventiveness, Ancient Evenings lives on in the mind long after the last tick.
©1983 Norman Mailer (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
On God
Summary
A towering figure in American literature, Norman Mailer here explores his concept of the nature of God. In a series of probing, challenging, and uncommon dialogues, Mailer establishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both organized religion and atheism. He presents a view in which our world is created by an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of determined opposition by contrary powers in the universe. As war is waged for the souls of humans, we in our turn are given the freedom - indeed, the responsibility - to choose our own paths. Mailer believes that our individual behavior, a complex mix of good and evil, will be rewarded or punished with a reincarnation that fits the sum of our lives. Ever original and unpredictable, this inspiring verbal journey offers a unique vision of a world in which "God needs us as much as we need God".
©2007 Norman Mailer (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Big Empty
Summary
"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.
©2006 Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Deer Park
Summary
Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want - and how far they are willing to go to get it. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America's machinery of desire.
©1955, and copyright renewed 1983 Norman Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Oswald's Tale
Summary
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.
©1995 Norman Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, Inc, all rights reserved.