Chicago : a novel

David?Mamet

Harpercollins

Granta 16, Summer 1985: Science

Literature & Fiction

OLIVER SACKS

Tim O'Brien

primo-levi

Contemporary

Granta Magazine

Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet ranks among the century's most influential writers for stage and screen. His dialogue--abrasive, rhythmic--illuminates a modern aesthetic evocative of Samuel Beckett. His plots--surprising, comic, topical--have evoked comparisons to masters from Alfred Hitchcock to Arthur Miller. Here are two screenplays demonstrating the astounding range of Mamet's talents. The Spanish Prisoner, a neo-noir thriller about a research-and-development cog hoodwinked out of his own brilliant discovery, demonstrates Mamet's incomparable use of character in a dizzying tale of twists and mistaken identity. The Winslow Boy, Mamet's revisitation of Terence Rattigan's classic 1946 play, tells of a thirteen-year-old boy accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order and the tug of war for truth that ensues between his middle-class family and the Royal Navy. Crackling with wit, intelligent and surprising, The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy celebrate Mamet's unique genius and our eternal fascination with the extraordinary predicaments of the common man.

The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy: Two Screenplays

Dramas & Plays

Vintage

David Mamet Full Length, ComedyCharacters: 3 male (1 non-speaking) Bare stageThe Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross  and Speed-The-Plow, takes us into the lives of two actors: John, young and rising into the first flush of his success; the other Robert, older, anxious, and beginning to wane. In a series of short, spare, and increasingly raw exchanges, we see the estrangement of youth from age and the wider, inevitable and endless cycle of life, in and out of the theatre.  "A comedy about the artifice of acting...It is also about the artifice of living...An evening of pure theatre."-The New York Times   "A comic masterpiece."-New York Daily News   "The warmest and often the funniest play in town."-New York Post "[Mamet has] the most acute ear for dialogue of any American writer since J.D. Salinger."-Village Voice

A Life in the Theatre

GROVE PRESS

A portrait of two young lovers spending a night in his family's cabin in the woods offers insight into the actions and emotions of people in love

The Woods: A Play

David Mamet is one of America’s most celebrated playwrights. The author of plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, and children’s books, he has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross.The Obie award-winning Sexual Perversity in Chicago is about two office workers, Danny and Bernie, on the make in the swinging singles scene of the early 1970s. Danny meets Deborah in a library and soon they are not only lovers but roommates, and their story quickly evolves into a modern romance in all its sticky details.The Duck Variations is a dialogue between two old men sitting on a park bench. The conversation turns to the mating habits of ducks, but soon begins to reveal their feelings about natural law, friendship, and death. New York magazine has called The Duck Variations a gorgeously written, wonderfully observant piece whose timing and atmosphere are close to flawless.”

Sexual perversity in Chicago and The duck variations: Two plays

Distributed by Random House

House of Games is a psychological thriller in which a young woman psychiatrist falls prey to an elaborate and ingenious con game by one of her patients who entraps her in a series of criminal escapades. Ties in with movie to be released in September. 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

House of Games (Methuen Screenplays)

Jonathan Ned Katz

Methuen Drama

Duck Variations: "A brilliant little play...about two old men sitting on a park bench discussing ducks" (Guardian); Sexual Perversity in Chicago, bar-room banter and sexual exploits in Mamet's home town "sweet sad understanding and utterly believable" (Chicago Daily News); Squirrels is a sequence of philosophising between a younger writer, an older writer and a cleaning lady which "memorably captures the agony of the creative process" (Daily Telegraph); American Buffalo, one of Mamet's most famous plays, is set in a junk shop where Three small-time crooks plot to carry out the midnight robbery of a coin collection - in the hours leading up to the heist, friendship becomes the victim in a conflict between loyalty and business. The Water Engine is "a propulsive, kaleidoscopic nightmare" and Mr Happiness is a short ironic monologue by a Radio DJ commenting on the letters from his listeners.

Plays 'Duck Variations'@@ 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago'@@ 'Squirrels'@@ 'American Buffalo'@@ 'the Water Engine'@@ 'Mr.Happiness

METHUEN

"The finest American playwright of his generation" (Sunday Times) Glen Garry Glen Ross (also made in to a film starring Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino) "his superb play about real estate salesmen in a cut-throat sales competition" (New Society); in Prairie du Chien a railway carriage speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder and suicide, told within shooting distance of a card-hustler and his victim. "A short poignant study in violence and the twin drives of love and money, told with hypnotic power thorugh a travelling raconteur" (City Limits); The Shawl shows a clairvoyant wondering whether to cheat a bereaved woman of her inheritance and "confirms Mamet's place as about the best living writer of vivid American dialogue" (Daily Telegraph). Set in the cut-throat world of Hollywood, Speed-the-Plow sees two old-time movie collaborators manipulate the aspirations of a young woman who will do anything to attain her dream of success "a brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity." (Newsweek)

Plays

Oleanna

Mamet's ground-breaking and controversial play on the male-female power struggle, annotated with an introduction, notes and commentary. "An ear for reproducing everyday language has long been David Mamet's hallmark and he has now employed it to skewer the dogmatic, puritannical streak which has become commonplace on and off the campus. With Oleanna he continues an exploration of male-female conflicts begun with Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974. Oleanna cogently demonstrates that when free thought and dialogue are imperilled, nobody wins." (Michael Wise, Independent) In Oleanna "John and Carol go to it with hand-to hand combat that amounts to a primal struggle for power. As usual with Mamet, the vehicle for that combat is crackling, highly distilled dialogue unencumbered by literary frills or phony theatrical ones." (Frank Rich, International Herald Tribune)

History & Criticism

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Books by David?Mamet