The Big Empty

Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer
February 2006     ISBN: 1560258241

"Questions are posed," writes Norman Mailer, "in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions." In these conversations, John Buffalo Mailer poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years.

Their wide-ranging discussions take place over a year, against the backdrop of George W. Bush's re-election campaign and the war in Iraq. John asks his father to look back to World War II, and explore the parallels that can--and cannot--be drawn between that era and our current post-9/11 consciousness. In the course of meditations on history, culture and politics in today's America, a uniquely powerful father-and-son relationship is revealed.

Norman Mailer was 25 when he published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. In 1969, The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He lives in Provincetown and Brooklyn.

John Buffalo Mailer is an actor, playwright and journalist. A founding member of Back House productions, he is the author of the plays Crazy Eyes and Hello Herman. He lives in Brooklyn.