A big-shouldered, big-trouble thriller set in mobbed-up 1920s Chicago―a city where some people knew too much, and where everyone should have known better―by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Untouchables and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Mike Hodge―veteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune, medium fry―probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with Annie Walsh. Then, again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh have known better than to trifle with Mike Hodge.
In Chicago, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic page-turner that roars through the Windy City’s underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion. Here is not only his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era, suffused with trademark "Mamet Speak," richness of voice, pace, and brio, and exploring―as no other writer can―questions of honor, deceit, revenge, and devotion, Chicago is that rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind gusting off Lake Michigan.

Chicago: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

MAMET, David

United States

Custom House

Chicago

CHICAGO

CustomHse

Harper Large Print

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! 
“Savagery appeased can only grow. Once you give in to it, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air.” 
The man who won the Pulitzer Prize for GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, who wrote the classic films THE VERDICT and WAG THE DOG sounds his alarm about the Visigoths at our gates. 
In RECESSIONAL he calls out, skewers, mocks, and, most importantly, dissects the virus of conformity which is now an existential threat to the West. 
A broad-ranging journey through history, the Bible, and literature, RECESSIONAL examines how politics and cultural attitudes about rebellion have shifted in the United States in the last generation. By screaming down freedom of thought and expression, Mamet explains, we kill invention and democracy – the foundations of security and growth. 
A wickedly funny, wistful and wry appeal to the free-thinking citizen, RECESSIONAL is a vital warning that if we don’t confront the cultural thuggery now, the commissars and their dupes will transform the Land of the Free into the dictatorship at which they aim.

Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

Arts & Photography

Broadside Books

Temporarily putting aside his role as playwright, director, and screen-writer, David Mamet digs deep and delivers thirty outrageously diverse vignettes. On subjects ranging from the vanishing American pool hall, family vacations, and the art of being a bitch, to the role of today's actor, his celebrated contemporaries and predecessors, and his undying commitment to the theater, David Mamet's concise style, lean dialogue, and gut-wrenching honesty give us a unique view of the world as he sees it.

Writing in Restaurants

Humor & Entertainment

Penguin Publishing Group

Collects the introspective, controversial, and carefully rendered musings of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and screenwriter as he tackles American Judaism, the art world, Stanislavsky, and other topics

Some Freaks

Penguin??Books

A masterclass on the art of directing from the Pulitzer Prize-winning (and Oscar and Tony-nominated) writer of Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed the Plow, The Verdict, and Wag the Dog Calling on his unique perspective as playwright, screenwriter, and director of his own critically acclaimed movies like House of Games, State and Main, and Things Change, David Mamet illuminates how a film comes to be. He looks at every aspect of directing—from script to cutting room—to show the many tasks directors undertake in reaching their prime objective: presenting a story that will be understood by the audience and has the power to be both surprising and inevitable at the same time. Based on a series of classes Mamet taught at Columbia University's film school, On Directing Film will be indispensible not only to students but to anyone interested in an overview of the craft of filmmaking. "Passion, clarity, commitment, intelligence—just what one would expect from Mamet." —Sidney Lumet, Academy Award-nominated director of 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and The Verdict

On Directing Film

Movies

What makes good drama? How does drama matter in our lives? In Three Uses of the Knife, one of America's most respected writers reminds us of the secret powers of the play. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama―and the experience of great plays―in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world. In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public spectacle to the private script. It is our fundamental nature to dramatize everything. As Mamet says, "Our understanding of our life, of our drama.... resolves itself into thirds: Once Upon a Time.... Years Passed.... And Then One Day." We inhabit a drama of daily life―waiting for a bus, describing a day's work, facing decisions, making choices, finding meaning. The essays in the book are an eloquent reminder of how life is filled with the small scenes of tragedy and comedy that can be described only as drama. First-rate theater, Mamet writes, satisfies the human hunger for ordering the world into cause-effect-conclusion. A good play calls for the protagonist "To create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us―and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character." Drama works, in the end, when it supplies the meaning and wholeness once offered by magic and religion―an embodied journey from lie to truth, arrogance to wisdom. Mamet also writes of bad theater; of what it takes to write a play, and the often impossibly difficult progression from act to act; the nature of soliloquy; the contentless drama and empty theatrics of politics and popular entertainment; the ubiquity of stage and literary conventions in the most ordinary of lives; and the uselessness, finally, of drama―or any art―as ideology or propaganda.

Three Uses of the Knife

Dramas & Plays

Columbia University Press

Pulitzer Prize—winning playwright David Mamet’s Romance is an uproarious, take-no-prisoners courtroom comedy that gleefully lampoons everyone from lawyers and judges, to Arabs and Jews, to gays and chiropractors. It’s hay fever season, and in a courtroom a judge is popping antihistamines. He listens to the testimony of a Jewish chiropractor, who’s a liar, according to his anti-Semitic defense attorney. The prosecutor, a homosexual, is having a domestic squabble with his lover, who shows up in court in a leopard-print thong. And all the while, a Middle East peace conference is taking place. Masterfully wielding the argot of the courtroom, David Mamet creates a world in microcosm in which shameless fawning, petty prejudices, and sheer caprice hold sway, and the noble apparatus of law and order degenerates into riotous profanity.

Romance

Vintage

One hundred years after the first publication of The Voysey Inheritance, David Mamet resurrects Harley Granville-Barker’s classic investigation into the capitalist soul in this brilliant adaptation. For generations, the Voysey family business has been secretly skimming money from its clients’ accounts. When Edward, designated to take over the firm from his aging father, discovers the embezzlement that has been keeping his relatives in a life of luxury, he must weigh the trappings of wealth and the imperative to preserve his family’s good name against the better principles of his conscience. But moral righteousness turns to self-protection when he comes to understand fully the consequences of his “inheritance.”

The Voysey Inheritance: A Play

Parenting & Relationships

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MAMET, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MAMET, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MAMET, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Chicago: A Novel

CHICAGO

Chicago: A Novel

Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

Writing in Restaurants

Some Freaks

On Directing Film

Three Uses of the Knife

Romance

The Voysey Inheritance: A Play