Barbary Shore: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

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 that 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.

Reviews

Praise for Barbary Shore

A work of remarkable power, of amazing penetration, both into people and the determining forces of American life.The Atlantic Monthly

Vibrant with life, abundant with real people . . . [Mailer has] a scintillating skill in observation, a mature sense of meaning.The Philadelphia Inquirer

This book is nothing short of amazing.Newsweek

Barbary Shore [is] about the kind of countryand what you might call the psychic territorythat American war heroes were returning to.The Guardian

Praise for Norman Mailer

[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.The New York Times

A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.The New Yorker

Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.The Washington Post

A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.Life

Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.The New York Review of Books

The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.Chicago Tribune

Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.The Cincinnati Post

Author Bio

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, 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.