The Executioner's Song
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The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer
History
James Mustich
Jul 29, 2018
After the imaginative and verbal fecundity of Mailer’s work throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in which the ornate sentences seemed to be feasting on some literary Miracle-Gro, the stripped-down prose of his massive book about the murderer Gary Gilmore is shocking. Its declarative simplicity pulls the reader urgently through a landscape of violence, emptiness, and everyday family bewilderment that is as profound and dramatic a depiction of American life as Mailer would draw; in its secret modulations of cadence and image, the writing is as artful as any he ever composed. Violence, crime, misdirected courage, perilous love, dreams of reincarnation, institutional insularity, the senseless and insatiable hunger of mass media—the themes that haunt the one thousand pages of The Executioner’s Song are a catalog of the author’s enduring preoccupations.
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Steve Jump
Dec 2, 2018
Mailer's masterpiece? I've been inserting a space between paragraphs ever since reading this.
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Jessica
Dec 12, 2024
classic
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