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Start giftingThe Spooky Art
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Learn more“Writing is spooky,” according to Norman Mailer. “There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words.” In The Spooky Art, Mailer discusses with signature candor the rewards and trials of the writing life, and recommends the tools to navigate it. Addressing the reader in a conversational tone, he draws on the best of more than fifty years of his own criticism, advice, and detailed observations about the writer’s craft.
Praise for The Spooky Art
“The Spooky Art shows Mailer’s brave willingness to take on demanding forms and daunting issues.… He has been a thoughtful and stylish witness to the best and worst of the American century.” —The Boston Globe
“At his best—as artists should be judged—Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure. There is enough of his best in this book for it to be welcomed with gratitude.” —The Washington Post
“[The Spooky Art] should nourish and inform—as well as entertain—almost any serious reader of the novel.” —Baltimore Sun
“The richest book ever written about the writer’s subconscious.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Striking…entrancingly frank.” —Entertainment Weekly
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.