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When Norman Mailer was inducted into the Army, in March, 1944, he was freshly married twenty-one-year-old Harvard graduate, a slight young man of five feet eight inches and a hundred and thirty-five pounds. In the previous few years, he had published some stories and written a play and two novels (one of them published, in a typescript facsimile, as “A Transit to Narcissus,” in 1978). Even as a student, he thought of himself as a professional writer, and from the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941, he had wanted to write a big book about the war. He was sent for basic training to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where many of the men were from Pennsylvania, the South, and the Upper Midwest. Mailer was from middle-class Jewish Brooklyn; he had landed in the great working-class Gentile world, and was eager to observe. He canvassed the recruits about their sex lives, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. (He discovered that many of them did not believe in foreplay.) Mailer knew that tough Jews served in the war, including criminals, louts, and bitterly determined, hardworking men, but he was without physical skills. He had never worked a thresher, or manhandled heavy goods into a truck, or tinkered with Dad’s jalopy.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 26, 2022 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 26, 2022 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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Screams from a Marriage
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
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Fly with Me
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The Mystery of Pain
Garth Greenwell’s novel of extreme affliction and ordinary happiness.
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The Show Must Go On
What if Ronald Reagan’ Presidency never really ended?
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LAST COFFEEHOUSE ON TRAVIS
For a few months, I stayed with my aunt's friend in Midtown, back when she could still afford to live there.
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Tales from the New World
The novelist Richard Powers considers our changing earth.
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Land of the Flea
What America 1s buying and selling.
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The Dark Time
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The Post-Moral Age
If conscience is merely a biological artifact, must we give up on goodness?
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How We Got the Story
This five-part series, which includes this three-part series on how we got the story, is the result of a two-year investigation, involving dozens of legal filings, scores of interview requests, several interviews, innumerable Zoom meetings, and five 311 calls.