Deer Park: A Novel - Softcover

Mailer, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812986156 ISBN 13: 9780812986150

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2015

Synopsis

Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want--and how far they are willing to go to get it. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America's machinery of desire.

Praise for The Deer Park

"A scathing portrayal of Hollywood . . . studded with brilliant and illuminating passages."--The New York Times Book Review

"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent . . . [Mailer] drives us up and down The Deer Park at breakneck speed. It is a trip through unfamiliar country, for a time funny and then unnerving."--The New Yorker

"Savage . . . brilliant . . . exhilarating."--The Atlantic Monthly

"Entertaining and wise . . . In addition to his furious energy and true ear, Mailer is simpatico with humanity . . . on a level rare in American fiction."--The New Republic

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

"Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--The Washington Post

"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

About this title

Review:

Praise for The Deer Park

"A scathing portrayal of Hollywood . . . studded with brilliant and illuminating passages."--The New York Times Book Review

"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent . . . [Mailer] drives us up and down The Deer Park at breakneck speed. It is a trip through unfamiliar country, for a time funny and then unnerving."--The New Yorker

"Savage . . . brilliant . . . exhilarating."--The Atlantic Monthly

"Entertaining and wise . . . In addition to his furious energy and true ear, Mailer is simpatico with humanity . . . on a level rare in American fiction."--The New Republic

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

"Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--The Washington Post

"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

From the Back Cover:

Desert D'Or is the fashionable Californian resort where Hollywood's glittering élite converge when they need a break from the city of celluloid dreams. It is an incestuous hothouse of a town – a haven for manipulators, film stars, lovers, pimps, producers, whores, gamblers, scriptwriters and cheats.

Into this nightmare world of depravity arrives Sergius O'Shaughnessy, recently discharged from the Air Force, traumatised by his war experiences and trying to write the Great American Novel. But O'Shaughnessy's burning ambition begins to lose its edge as he is drawn deeper into the reckless lives of Charles Eitel, the disgraced film genius, Lulu Meyers, the egomaniacal young movie star and the seedy, perspiring studio chief Herman Teppis. Lured by greed and ruled by weakness, O'Shaughnessy soon becomes disturbingly familiar with the dangerous life of slick compromises and sexual follies...

Mailer's third novel, 'The Deer Park' is a powerful and vigorous satire on Hollywood's excesses and corruptions. Combining a savage imagination with a heightened documentary realism, Mailer painted an uncompromising and terrifying portrait of a society in moral confusion and despair.

“It is the peculiar insight and power of 'The Deer Park' that it does not present its unhappy conditions sensationally, but as though they were common enough, which they are, and as though people succeeded in living with them for years, which they do. As a Hollywood novel, 'The Deer Park' ranks with F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Last Tycoon' and Nathanael West's 'The Day of the Locust'. It speaks for promising, gifted people anywhere who have succumbed to their appetites and lost their spirit among the singularly intricate temptations of the modern world.”
NEWSWEEK

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0812986156
• ISBN 13: 9780812986150
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384