a book
The Executioner’s Song
Norman Mailer · 2012 · 1136 pages
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.
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.
recommended by 4 people
sourced from public statements
Gillian Flynn
“I remember reading Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song at a pretty young age. It’s about one of the last men who was executed in Utah and Mailer turned it into this beautiful, elegiac story of life and death, love and violence. Gary Gilmore has been in and out of prison all his life and you’re rooting for him to do the right thing. He falls in love and he doesn’t know what to do with that emotion, how to handle a relationship, and he handles it by finally blowing up and killing some people. It changed my mind because I didn’t know you could empathize so much with someone who could make such a cold-blooded and completely wrong decision.”↗
Joan Didion
“I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in “The Executioner’s Song,” is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of “The Executioner’s Song” is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting.”↗
Emily St John Mandel
“I get some strange looks when I cite this book as an influence. It’s almost as if some people confuse the question ‘Which books influenced you?’ with ‘Which writers do you uncritically adore, and do you also approve of them stabbing their spouses?’ I don’t like most of the Mailer books that I’ve read. But his book about serial killer Gary Gilmore is a masterpiece, and it changed the way I write.”↗
Chris Pine
“It’s so tremendous in its depth, and the layers of these people’s lives that it peels back. Mailer can’t help but fall in love a bit with the protagonist, who’s a killer. He finds the strange brilliance and charisma and perhaps sociopathy of his primary character, and how he twists the lives of the people around him, and he becomes both tragic and awful and worthy of compassion and empathy, like any normal human being. So, it’s really complicated. Brings up a lot as you read it.”↗