The Deer Park

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 downThe 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 issimpatico 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

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel,The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer forThe Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.