Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Putnam, New York
Date Published: 1959
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Good, In good dust jacket. 532 p. 22 cm. A collection of the author's short stories, articles, and essays, connected by an autobiographical narrative. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: New American Library, New York
Date Published: 1960
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. 477 p.; 18 cm. Signet books; T11889.. A collection of the author's short stories, articles, and essays, connected by an autobiographical narrative. "First printing, November 1960. " read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Signet books, New York
Date Published: 1960
Description: Good. No dust jacket. 477 p.; 18 cm. Signet books; T11889.. A collection of the author's short stories, articles, and essays, connected by an autobiographical narrative. "First printing, November 1960. " read more
Edition: 1st Edition 1st Printing PB
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Book, New York, NY USA
Date Published: 1960
Description: Very Good. No Jacket Issued. Book is in very good condition for age: But for a Coffee? stain on upper right corner of cover which shows on first 25 and last 6 pages; tag ghost on top of spine; and owners stamp/name on inside of cover, book would be near fine or better. Otherwise, book is tight, square and unmarked. USPS Delivery Confirmation included. read more
Description: Very Good. No Dj. 7 By 4.25 " AN UNREAD FIRST PRINTING PAPERBACK OF THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY SIGNET ESDITION. 477 PAGES. NO NAMES OR UNDERLINING. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
Date Published: 1976
ISBN-13:9780425032824ISBN:0425032825
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Great copy! Nearly perfect inside and out EXCEPT for slight edge wear and scuffs on front cover. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York
Date Published: 1959
Description: Good in Fair jacket. First Edition Good, sound, tight copy in fair pictorial dustwrapper 532pp., Book is spine faded w/ general shelfwear; the dw is edgeworn & rubbed w/ shallow chipping head of spine & jagged chip at base. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: New American Library, New York
Date Published: 1960
Description: Poor. No dust jacket. Ex-library. 477 p.; 18 cm. Signet books; T11889.. A collection of the author's short stories, articles, and essays, connected by an autobiographical narrative. "First printing, November 1960. " read more
Edition: First Thus
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet
Date Published: 1960
Description: Very Good + ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF by Norman Mailer. Signet, 1960. Binding: Mass Market PaperbackDust Jacket: . NOTES: Stated First Printing. Showing very light exterior wear/creasing, contents are overall clean and tight with no owner markings. Signet # T1889Images available upon request. Please email us with any questions. read more
Binding: Trade pb
Publisher: Berkley Publishing Corp, New York
Date Published: 1976, c1959
Description: Very Good. No dust jacket. Berkley Windhover book; B3282. First printing. xviii, 491 p. ; 20 cm A collection of the author's short stories, articles, and essays, connected by an autobiographical narrative. read more
Edition: 1st
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Signet Books, N. Y.
Date Published: 1960
Description: Cover Art. Good. No Jacket. Vintage Paperback. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" Tall. Cover Price.75 cents------#T1889-------The cover has light shelf wear with a small spot of covering missing......Light yellowing to the pages. read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: G.P. Puitnam's Sons, New York
Date Published: 1959
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. 532 p. Red and black cloth-bound book with gilt lettering on front in excellent condition with previous owner's bookplate inside; pictorial DJ in near-fine condition. First edition, first printing. read more
"In addition to a selection of Mailer's early writing (short stories, journalistic articles, essays, interviews, poems), this book includes the author's critical comments about that work. The book includes "The White Negro," an essay analyzing the social and political conditions out of which the "Beat Generation" emerged."
"After the vertiginous success of his World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer's next two novels, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, were critically mauled. Advertisements for Myself (1959), a collection of stories, essays, a play excerpt, and Village Voice columns, followed in the wake of fame and disaster. The title cannily reflected Mailer's suspicion of "the little institutional lies from the print of newspapers" and mass media. Thus the volume is threaded by an autobiographical narrative or self-advertisements, and looks toward the author's incorporation of fictional techniques into nonfiction reportage in books such as The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago. This collection displays Mailer's strengths and weaknesses in all their extravagance, including his grandiose ego and ambition to "write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner and even old mouldering Hemingway, might come to read."
In the brilliant opening sentences of "The White Negro," Mailer considers the "psychic havoc" of the atomic bomb and the Nazi extermination camps: "(W)e might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked. . .our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop." The possibility of mass death could well mean the dehumanizing extinction of personality: a chilling vision of late 20th century existence.
Given the period, the confessional tone of the self-advertisements is striking: "There may have been too many fights for me, too much sex, liquor, marijuana, benzedrine and seconal, much too much ridiculous and brain-blasting rage at the miniscule frustrations of a most loathsome literary world, necrophiliac to the core--they murder their writers, and then decorate their graves." He has a canny self-knowledge about his own prose: "To write about myself is to send my style through a circus of variations and postures, a fireworks of virtuosity. . .I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I believe I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style." His ceaseless reinvention on the page would become a hallmark of his career. It may well be that "Norman Mailer" was Mailer's greatest creation.
In Mailer's desire to explore themes of "murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm, and Time"--and, I would add, race--his taste for the apocalyptic, the extreme and the transgressive, he prefigured the social chaos that would engulf the Sixties.
Mailer earned few friends with his piece, "Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room," in which he savages contemporaries such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, and Wiliam Styron. More damaging, though, is his dismissal of virtually all women writers and his confession that he has "never been able to read Virginia Woolf." This is a serious flaw in a major American writer. It would've been helpful had Mailer been reminded of Woolf's assertion that "the minds of all great writers are androgynous." Shakespeare was her prime example.
What is practically indefensible is Mailer's equation between the act of writing and heterosexual masculinity, his endorsement of violence as an existential act, his linkage between cancer and personality. At times, the distinction between art and life became messily blurred--no more so than with Mailer's stabbing of his second wife, Adele Morales, and his touting of the prison writings of murderer Jack Henry Abbott, who upon parole killed again. On occasion, the author's Dostoevskyan, Reichian, Manichean ideas had disastrous consequences in the world.
Having said that, Advertisements for Myself was a success on its own terms: it provoked the outrage that was its intent, a Molotov cocktail to disrupt what the author saw as the timidity and conformity of the Eisenhower years."
"Mailer seems like an important transitional figure for the American zeitgeist. He's a champion of the look-at-me attitude that after decades of growth has found a new level on the internet. However, he balances this solipsism with intellectual rigor, or more precisely, the appearance of intellectual rigor, which hasn't as readily translated to the Web 2.0."
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