The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing
Mailer's book on the craft of writing (Random House, 2003), published on his 80th birthday — about 190 previously published passages and interview answers woven together with some 50 new pieces, most of the old interviewers' questions absorbed into his replies.
The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, Mailer’s book on his craft, published by Random House on 31 January 2003 — his 80th birthday (330 pp., $24.95). It is dedicated “To J. Michael Lennon.” Mailer assembled it from excerpts of roughly 190 previously published items plus some 50 new pieces written expressly for the book, folding most interviewers’ questions into his own replies. He timed it pointedly: “It is interesting that my ceremonial sense intensifies as I grow older … I will be exactly eighty years old on that occasion… . Can I possibly be speaking the truth?” Advance excerpts had run in The New Yorker (“Birds and Lions,” 02.12). Rpt: portions in Mind of an Outlaw (13.1).
Reception
The notices divided sharply. Favorable reviews came from Roger Lewis (Spectator), Shaun O’Connell (Boston Globe), Jeff Simon (Buffalo News), Eric Tarloff (Washington Post), and Ed Leebrun (Provincetown Arts); Samantha Puckett (St. Petersburg Times) was mixed; and Mailer’s perennial antagonists John Leonard (“Don Quixote at Eighty,” New York Review of Books) and Michiko Kakutani (New York Times, again — see 95.36) were negative.
Related pages
- Random House | J. Michael Lennon
- 2003
- The Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays of Norman Mailer (13.1)