Vous voulez voir cette page en français ? Cliquez ici.


or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings
 
See larger image 
Share your own customer images
Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.

Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings [Paperback]

Norman Mailer (Author)
2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 22.95
Price: CDN$ 17.51 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details
You Save: CDN$ 5.44 (24%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Usually ships within 10 to 13 days.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca. Gift-wrap available.

Product Details

Product Description

Product Description

An unexpected collection from Norman Mailer—a book of his selected poems and more than one hundred of his drawings, most of them never before published. Modest Gifts is full of what the author calls “casual pleasures”—witty, naughty, and surprisingly tender verse and art. Lust, seduction, betrayal, jealousy, and even the banality of cocktail party chatter are depicted with humor, affection, and, above all, honesty. Here is an aspect of Norman Mailer unknown to many: lighthearted, prankish, whimsical, and often gentle, playfully sketching the intimate urban world that surrounds us. Modest, funny, and true, each poem and drawing shows a new side of one of the greatest writers of our time.

About the Author

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner’s Song. His most recent books, both published by Random House, are The Spooky Art and Why Are We at War? He lives in Provincetown with his wife, Norris Church Mailer.
See all Product Description

Tag this product

 (What's this?)
Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.
Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags
 

Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
5 star:    (0)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
2.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most helpful customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars God Bless Norman Mailer, Jan 5 2004
By 
S. Simpson "mattadoors" (Germantown, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (Paperback)
After all these years some humble pie. Some of this is yet still too sour for our friends in Haters Review Row. Too bad. Norman Mailer is one of the greatest writers of our time, whether you like him or not. If you don't like him, don't waste your time "reviewing" his work, just go away and leave us alone, we don't need any more of your whining. This book gave me a lot of little laughs, and some "modest gifts" of insightful and not-so-great "poems" or "prose-snippets", whatever you would like to call them. It was a fun release from the more arduous "Of a Fire On the Moon" which I am currently reading. I just finished The Prisoner of Sex, written by Mailer in 1970-- quite an interesting take on the "Women's Lib" movement at that time-- a bit heady, but with other equipment as well (!) God Bless Norman Mailer, one of the last great American authors.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


2.0 out of 5 stars Mailer's Genius is Not On Display with Poetry Re-Issue, Nov 30 2003
By 
Ted Burke "Ted Burke" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (Paperback)
I, like many, think that Mailer ought to win the Nobel Prize for literature for the sheer genius of his published over his fifty plus years as a writer. Few of his generation, or in generations following, have have the kind of profound successes in fiction, reportage, cultural criticism, and political essay.

Mailer has dared what other literary writers only feigned and actively engaged the world in ways and manners that he thought would make reality surrender some of its secrets. The hope, of course, would be that he might be able to change the way men and women viewed themselves in a political reality that had stripped the individual of all creative drive, and hence empower them to change the substance of their world. Grand ambition, yes, and a failed enterprise,but in the attempt are left a string of brilliant books -- "The Naked and the Dead", "The Executioner's Song", "Why are We In Viet Nam", "Armies of the Night", "An American Dream", "Harlot's Ghost",-- that, among others, form a body of work at once daring,daunting, vain and arrogant, preening, breathtakingly on target, raunchy , clipped, rich and rolling and lyrical like the grandest music. An infuriating writer, yes, but even so one who's work stands tall in the era in which he wrote.

This, though, isn't one of those books," Modest Gifts" being, at best, a gussied up reissue of a lone book of verse he produced in the early Sixties,"Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Diasters)".

Now, as then, the pieces are slight, skeletal, un-propelled by anything resembling a notion that the reader cares about. For a writer who's composed some of the richest prose and lyric flights this side of Faulkner and DeLillo, these efforts are so minimal that even a verbal skinflint like Hemingway would call these gifts not modest ,but cheap. Mailer explains interestingly that these were put together at a bad time in his life when he could not compose--stabbing your wife will tend to
dampen your willingness to wax--and that he found something therapeutic in their existence, but there never has been a compelling reason for these things to be put between covers and sold. Unlike some, I think that a great writer's less great work, the unformed work, the jottings, the juvenilia,the notebooks, the scraps and orts, need to remain in the drawer, and not committed to the judgment of history. This poetry is so minimal that it can't even raise a stink.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


1.0 out of 5 stars an irrelevant author, Nov 17 2003
This review is from: Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (Paperback)
i don't know why mailer is a literary icon. calling his novels boring and pedantic would be an understatement. this book is just a lot of senile doodling from a writer who has outlived his relevancy. i don't know of anyone who likes mailer's books. they don't get taught in schools anymore, and perhaps that speaks volumes about the durability of his creative vision. this meandering brain-fart of a book, like harlot's ghost, will not stand the test of time. i guess it's time to say goodbye to an icon, who, in all honesty, was never much of a writer to begin with.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  3.3 out of 5 stars 
 
 
Only search this product's reviews


Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject












i.e., each book must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Amazon.ca Privacy Statement Amazon.ca Shipping Information Amazon.ca Returns & Exchanges