The Time of Our Time - Rilegato

A giant retrospective: selections by the author of his best work--including new material for the paperback edition--
ingeniously arranged to tell the story of the past half-century

"[It] is that rarity, an anthology that can be read straight through. Its neatly interwoven sections collectively tell a story of their own, a social history of postwar America, at the heart of which is Mailer's own tangled love affair with this country."
--James Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the anthology's more remarkable effects is to make us forget which realm we are in--nonfiction or fiction, reality or fantasy--or why any of these categories matter. . . . In Mailer's retelling of it, the recent history of the country becomes largely its secret history; assassination plots and love affairs move the levers of reality. As readers, we happily enter a long, long night in which movie stars, Presidents, intelligence operatives, and gangsters meet in the ideal Mailer after-hours spot where only grown-ups are allowed to gather and where the music is always insinuating and sweet. The book becomes, willy-nilly, a kind of erotic commingling of these big players."
--David Denby, The New Yorker

"A unique, and very useful, work, and certainly the best possible introduction to one of the most prodigious careers in modern American letters."
--Kirkus Reviews

"An often mesmerizing attempt to reflect the times through the distorting mirror of the writer's own intense preoccupation during the 50 years since his first novel. . . . No observer has had a keener instinct for the essences of politicians' characters or for the textures of celebrated and marginal American lives, and no contemporary American writer has been less willing to say only what it is safe to say."
--Entertainment Weekly

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received a second Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.
"No contemporary writer could match the book's variety, its manic energy,
its spiritual violence and striving."--David Denby, The New Yorker
From the Trade Paperback edition.

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York.  After graduating from Harvard, he served as a rifleman in the South Pacific during World War II.

He published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948.  Mailer won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Armies of the Night and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song.

He has directed four feature-length films, was co-founder of The Village Voice in 1955, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1969, and was president of the American PEN from 1984 to 1986.