"As the biographer of both Henry Miller (one of Mailer's heroes) and the radical journalist Louise Bryant, Dearborn is uniquely sensitive to Mailer's best and worst sides."--BOOK JACKET.

“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 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 “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

What is care? The Care Factory consists of six essays, each of which is an invitation to the reader to form an opinion on what care happens to be. Each chapter looks at care in a different setting, and a variety of psychoanalytic frameworks are employed on which to hang arguments. The eponymous first chapter investigates undergraduate courses in nursing and midwifery that have care on the syllabus. Is it possible to teach care? What if the person teaching care is not someone who cares? The second chapter is ‘Banquet of Crumbs’. If care can be experienced in any setting and at any time, is there anything that happens to those who care that we might regard as generic? What does caring do to the practitioners who care? The focus of ‘The Breaking of Wings’ is prisons and secure settings for children and adolescents. How do such institutions endorse and exhibit care? In ‘Nostalgia’s Engine’, the focus is on the care generated by successful group assimilation and the manufacture of nostalgia. Using the example of the punk movement of the 1970s, this chapter describes how organisations offer their participants communities of care, irrespective of their outward appearance of hostility. ‘Caring for Our Creations’ is about writing, and about one’s responsibilities for what one drafts into existence. This chapter is not so much about a narrative of care as the care of a narrative. Finally, ‘Take Care: A Coda’ represents a lesson on how one cares for oneself in an atmosphere of tension and bereavement anxiety.

Cameron Awkward Rich's Transit, runner-up for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, takes the reader on a constantly surprising journey through gender and identity in contemporary America. Awkward-Rich's academic prowess shines throughout, as does his remarkable ability to condense an essay's worth of thought and theory into a few poignant lines. A book to be read anywhere and everywhere: in a classroom, on the subway, under blankets on a cold winter night.

The first publication of a novel Mailer wrote at the age of 20, three years before he began work on The Naked and the Dead. Issued in an edition of 1,000 copies.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [907]-914) and index.