In 1959, Norman Mailer—between novels at the time—published a book called Advertisements for Myself. Even for Mailer, it was an unusual book—part compendium of unpublished short fiction, part clearing house for published short fiction, part a series of “Advertisements,” in which the writer, according to his own “Note to the Reader,” “surrounds all these writings with his present tastes, preferences, apologies, prides and occasional confessions.”
While it’s difficult, in 2025, to make much of a case for some of the fiction Mailer included (“The Time of Her Time,” basically a story about a woman’s very weirdly achieved orgasm) or even to see the nonfiction (“The White Negro,” “The Homosexual as Villain”) as having any but a historical interest, the Advertisements themselves stand as something sort of extraordinary, an unfiltered declaration of the kind of ambition novelists don’t normally trumpet these days.