Published to coincide with Mailer’s 80th birthday, Spooky Art gathers more than a half-century of essays, forming a bookend with his seminal 1959 collection Advertisements For Myself. As its subtitle implies, it’s intended as his definitive statement on the craft. But the sheer scope of the 350-page book means it’s of wider interest than your typical creative-writing textbook. Mailer expounds on his own career, with digressions that would be sufficient for a large tome of their own. Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted him to fame in an age when novelists had as much prestige as movie stars. He made the most of his power and hipster cachet, co-founding the Village Voice in 1955, and winning the Pulitzer twice for nonfiction, in the process helping to invent New Journalism. He worked throughout the 1960s for radical causes, declaring himself a revolutionary and “psychic outlaw,” then made a bitter enemy of the feminist movement. His personal life, like his writing and politics, careened wildly between brilliance and shocking excess, perhaps best epitomized by the day in 1960 when he announced his candidacy for mayor of New York, then later stabbed his wife during a drunken argument. While we don’t think we’d want Norman as a houseguest, he can sure knock out the memorable prose, and his opinions on literature are fiercely held and passionately stated. This is the lion surveying his kingdom, and it’s a pleasure to hear him roar.
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