The Executioner's Song - Softcover

Mailer, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 044658438X ISBN 13: 9780446584388

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2012

Synopsis

Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning and unforgettable classic about convicted killer Gary Gilmore now in a brand-new edition.

Arguably the greatest book from America's most heroically ambitious writer, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. And that fight for the right to die is what made him famous.

Mailer tells not only Gilmore's story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement-impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

About this title

Review:

"His greatest work was his 1979 epic The Executioner's Song... a masterpiece of reportage, fiction and stylistic writing" (Observer)

"A deeply unsettling account of a particular ordeal that suggests larger questions: the moralities of power's ends and means, the character of revolutionary fanaticism and the indecipherable humanity that flickers within it...by turns evocative, wise and crisscrossed by fury" (New York Times Book Review)

"A great writer: in the utterly enthralling story of Gary Gilmore's life and crimes Norman Mailer takes one as deeply into the criminal mind as it is possible to get" (Alan Sillitoe)

Book Description:

If you were enthralled by Capote's In Cold Blood, read The Executioner's Song

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 044658438X
• ISBN 13: 9780446584388
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1136