David Mamet Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Village (1994)
  2. Passover (1995)
  3. The Old Religion (1997)
  4. Wilson (2000)
  5. Chicago (2018)

Omnibus

  1. Three War Stories (2013)

Collections

  1. American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago , Duck Variations (1978)
  2. The Water Engine: An American Fable and Mr. Happiness : Two Plays (1978)
  3. Sexual Perversity in Chicago / The Duck Variations: Two Plays (1978)
  4. Reunion and Dark Pony: Two Plays (1979)
  5. Short Plays and Monologues (1981)
  6. Reunion ; Dark pony ; The sanctity of marriage: Three plays (1982)
  7. The Shawl; And- Prairie Du Chien: Two Plays (1985)
  8. Three Children’s Plays (1986)
  9. The Woods; Lakeboat; Edmond: Three Plays (1987)
  10. Three Jewish plays (1987)
  11. Five Television Plays (1990)
  12. Plays: Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Squirrels, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Mr.Happiness (1994)
  13. No One Will Be Immune (1994)
  14. Plays (1996)
  15. Short Plays and Sketches (1999)
  16. The Spanish Prisoner and Winslow Boy (1999)
  17. Goldberg Street (2000)

Plays

  1. American Buffalo (1977)
  2. A Life in the Theatre (1978)
  3. The Woods (1979)
  4. Lakeboat (1981)
  5. Squirrels (1982)
  6. Edmond (1983)
  7. The Frog Prince (1983)
  8. Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)
  9. The Shawl (1985)
  10. House of Games (1987)
  11. Speed-the-Plow (1988)
  12. Things Change (1989)
  13. We’re No Angels (1990)
  14. Oh Hell (1991)
  15. Oleanna (1993)
  16. The Cryptogram (1995)
  17. The Old Neighborhood (1998)
  18. Henrietta (1999)
  19. The Spanish Prisoner (1999)
  20. Winslow Boy (1999)
  21. Homicide (2000)
  22. Boston Marriage (2001)
  23. Faustus (2004)
  24. Romance (2005)
  25. November (2008)
  26. Keep Your Pantheon (2009)
  27. School (2010)
  28. Death Defying Acts (2010)
  29. Race (2010)
  30. David Mamet Shorts (2011)
  31. Keep Your Pantheon / School (2012)
  32. The Anarchist (2013)
  33. Mamet Plays: 6 (2015)
  34. China Doll (2015)
  35. Mamet Plays: 1 (2015)
  36. Mamet Plays: 2 (2015)
  37. Mamet Plays: 3 (2016)
  38. Mamet Plays: 4 (2016)
  39. Penitent (2017)
  40. Bitter Wheat (2019)

Picture Books

  1. Warm and Cold (1989)
  2. The Duck and the Goat (1996)
  3. Bar Mitzvah (1999)
  4. The Trials of Roderick Spode (2010)

Non fiction

  1. Chicago Performs (1977)
  2. Writing in Restaurants (1986)
  3. Some Freaks (1989)
  4. On Directing Film (1991)
  5. The Cabin (1992)
  6. A Who*re’s Profession (1994)
  7. Make Believe Town (1996)
  8. True and False (1997)
  9. Three Uses of the Knife (1998)
  10. Jafsie and John Henry (1999)
  11. Donald Sultan (1999)
  12. On Acting (1999)
  13. Directions (2002)
  14. Bambi vs. Godzilla (2007)
  15. The Wicked Son (2009)
  16. Theatre (2010)
  17. The Secret Knowledge (2011)
  18. Recessional (2022)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Picture Books Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

David Mamet Books Overview

Passover

As a grandmother and her young granddaughter work together at the kitchen table, preparing the traditional Passover recipe, the elderly woman reflects on their family’s traumatic past. By the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross.

The Old Religion

In 1913, a young woman was found murdered in the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. The investigation focused on the Jewish manager of the factory, Leo Frank, who was subsequently forced to stand trial for the crime he didn’t commit and railroaded to a life sentence in prison. Shortly after being incarcerated, he was abducted from his cell and lynched in front of a gleeful mob. In vividly re imagining these horrifying events, Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet inhabits the consciousness of the condemned man to create a novel whose every word seethes with anger over prejudice and injustice. The Old Religion is infused with the dynamic force and the remarkable ear that have made David Mamet one of the most acclaimed voices of our time. It stands beside To Kill a Mockingbird as a powerful exploration of justice, racism, and the ‘rush to judgment.’

Wilson

When the Internet and the collective memory of the 21st century crashes, the past is reassembled from the downloaded memories of Ginger, wife of ex President Wilson. The transcripts take the reader on an intellectually breathtaking tour. In Mamet’s baroque, fragmented world, nothing is certain except the certainty of academics. In playing with the ideas of perception, understanding, and accuracy, he dares to doubt them all. When truth is quicksand, the gag becomes a lifeline of stoic nobility.

After the Cola riots, the fire at the Stop n’ Shop, and the death of my kitten, what remains? Can any sense be made of the texts found in the capsule or stuffed in the airlock? Does the Joke Code still operate? Has anyone seen my copy of Bongazine? Who were the members of the Bootsie club? Does the Toll Hound dance? What was the meaning of the message written in Mrs. Wilson‘s urine? Can Jane of Trent unlock this paranoia? What were Chet and Donna doing in the boathouse? And just who does Ginger think she is?

Sexual Perversity in Chicago / The Duck Variations: Two Plays

Comedy Characters: 2 males, 2 females Bare stage, movable propsThe Obie award winning Sexual Perversity in Chicago ‘takes funny and painful digs at the fantasies and distances of the contemporary sexual game,’ according to The New York Times. Two male office workers, Danny and Bernie, are on the make in the swinging singles scene of the early 1970’s. Danny meets Deborah in a library and soon they are lovers as well as roommates. The other couple, Bernie and Joan, seem to have the politics of sex down pat but are as confused as their more naive counterparts. After much comic drama, the two men end as they started, talking a good game in the local bar. Published with The Duck Variations. ‘Mamet has the most acute ear for dialogue of any American writer since J.D. Salinger.’ The Village Voice ‘Marvelously observant…
A glittering mosaic of tiny, deadly muzzle flashes from the war between men and women among the filing cabinets and single bars.’ The New York Times

Reunion and Dark Pony: Two Plays

In these two moving early plays, Mamet displays the humor, sensitivity, and ear for language that have made him one of the most celebrated playwrights in American theater today.

The Shawl; And- Prairie Du Chien: Two Plays

The Shawl, which opened to critical and popular acclaim, is about a smalltime mystic out to bilk a bereaved woman out of her inheritance. In his review of the New Theatre Company’s presentation of The Shawl in Chicago, Richard Christiansen called the play a beautifully crafted piece of work, with a sharp, hurting edge…
. His Mamet s spinning of the yarn…
is ingenious, and his control of the sounds and rhythms of dialogue has never been more awesome…
. An exquisitely tooled chamber drama.

In Prairie du Chien a railroad car speeding through the Wisconsin night is the setting for a violent story of obsessive jealousy, murder, and suicide punctuated by the camaraderie of a friendly card game exploding into a moment of menace.

Five Television Plays

Five unique short plays for television by one of America’s most celebrated playwrights.

Plays

‘The finest American playwright of his generation’ Sunday Times Reunion shows the meeting between a father and daughter after nearly twenty years of separation: ‘It would be hard to over praise the way Mr Mamet suggests behind the probing, joshing family chat, an extraordinary sense of pain and loss…
although the play has a strong social comment about the destructively cyclical effect of divorce, it is neither sour nor defeatist’ Guardian; In Dark Play, a father tells his five year old daughter a story about an Indian boy and his pony ‘a subtle, lyrical, dreamlike vignette’ Star Tribune; in The Woods, a young man and woman spend the night in a cabin together ‘a beautifully conceived love story’ Chicago Daily News; Lakeboat portrays eight crew members of a merchant ship exchanging wild fantasies about sex, gambling and violence ‘Richly overheard talk…
loopy, funny construction.’ Village Voice; Edmond is an odyssey through the disturbing, suspended dark void of a contemporary New York ‘it is also a technically adventurous piece pared brilliantly to the bone, highly theatrical in its scenic elisions.’ Financial Times

The Spanish Prisoner and Winslow Boy

THE SPANISH PRISONER
‘Elegant, entertaining…
. Mamet’s craftiest and most satisfying cinematic puzzle.’ The New York Times

THE WINSLOW BOY
‘One of the most subtly compelling love stories of the year.’ The New York Observer

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.

Goldberg Street

From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross, here is a collection of thirty two one act plays and short dramatic pieces that David Mamet himself considers to be some of the best writing he has ever done.

American Buffalo

‘The finest American playwright of his generation’ Sunday Times A junk shop. 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.’This play is a parable about the US not in the journalistic way…
but quietly, stealthily, with all the rich interior organisation of a true work of art’ Observer

A Life in the Theatre

In a series of short, spare, and increasingly raw exchanges, we see the estrangement of youth from age and the wider, inevitable, endlessly cyclical rhythm of the world.

Glengarry Glen Ross

A student edition of Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize winning play First staged in Britain in 1983, Glengarry Glen Ross is the tale of four real estate salesmen in a cut throat sales competition. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and was made into a film, starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin, in 1992. ‘The finest American playwright of his generation’ Sunday Times ‘A chillingly funny indictment of a world in which you are what you sell’ Guardian ‘Nobody alive writes better American…
Here at last, carving characters out of language, is a play with real muscle’ Observer ‘David Mamet, screenwriter of The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice, is alongside Sam Shepard and Michael Weller, one of the most distinctive voices on the contemporary American stage’ Michael Coveney, Financial Times

House of Games

‘True but different, gripping but transparent, and full of genuine stage thrills. It’s a great show, very funny…
. It works, in fact, as a sort of black farce, and is given a new tone of absurdity that is purely theatrical.’-whatsonstage. com

Speed-the-Plow

Full Length, Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 1f / 2 ints. Revived on Broadway in 2008, the original production starred Joe Mantegna, Ron Silver and Madonna in this hilarious satire of Hollywood, a culture as corrupt as the society it claims to reflect. Charlie Fox has a terrific vehicle for a currently hot client. Bringing the script to his friend Bobby Gould, the newly appointed Head of Production at a major studio, both see the work as their ticket to the Big Time. The star wants to do it; as they prepare their pitch to the studio boss, Bobby wagers Charlie that he can seduce the temp/secretary, Karen. As a ruse, he gives her a novel by ‘some Eastern sissy’ writer that needs a courtesy read before being dismissed out of hand. Karen slyly determines the novel, not the movie star script, should be the company’s next film. She sleeps with Bobby who is so smitten with Karen and her ideals that he pleads with Charlie to drop the star project and and pitch the ‘Eastern sissy’ writer’s book. ‘Hilarious and chilling .’ The New York Times ‘Mamet’s clearest, wittiest play.’ The New York Daily News

Things Change

Gino is a humble shoe shiner in Chicago who is contacted by a mafia don and offered a large sum of money to take the rap for a murder committed by another gangster. Gino agrees, planning to buy a fishing boat with the money he will earn after the three year sentence. While preparing for his court confession, Gino is watched over by Jerry, a bottom rung gangster who has recently gotten into trouble for failing to follow orders. After a short and boring stay at a local hotel, Jerry decides to give Gino one last weekend to remember at Lake Tahoe before his prison sentence. After arriving at their casino, Jerry’s tall tales and Gino’s quiet dignity quickly get Gino mistaken for a wealthy and powerful mafioso, leading to complications for both men.

We’re No Angels

With this screenplay David Mamet gives the traditional prison break story his special blend of gripping suspense, slapdash buffoonery, and ingenious plotting. Bob, a vicious killer, cheats the electric chair by shooting his way out of the penitentiary, forcing two reluctant convicts to come along. Desperately dodging the cops, Ned and Jim reach a river that runs along the Canadian border. The bridge across it becomes their only hope of reaching safety, but a checkpoint guards the crossing. Mamet builds the tension to the breaking point with a series of sizzling surprises as time and again the escaped jailbirds fail by a hairsbreadth to slip past the guards.

Oh Hell

Bobby Gould in Hell by David Mamet Short Play, Comedy Characters: 3 male, 1 female Interior Set This is Bobby Gould’s day of reckoning. The conniving movie mogul from Speed the Plow awakes in a strange room. A loquacious interrogator in fishing waders enters. Gould argues his case. A woman he has wronged appears and gets so carried away that she says some sassy things to the Interrogator. In the end, Bobby is damned for being ‘cruel without being interesting.’ ‘Funny and pungent.’ N.Y. Times ‘Lifts the soul.’ N.Y. Daily News ‘Hilarious…
with flashy magic tricks.’ Newsday Published with The Devil and Billy Markham by Shel Silverstein Short Play, Comedy Characters: 1 male Bare stage In this amazing rendition of a tall tale written in rhymed couplets, Billy Markham loses a sucker’s bet with the Devil but ultimately outwits him. ‘A tour de force with the jokes coming Faust and furious.’ N.Y. Post. ‘A rip snorting, raunchy delight. Very, very funny.’ Associated Press

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

The Cryptogram

‘I suspect that in time, The Cryptogram will take its place among Mamet’s major works’ John Lahr ‘Mamet’s play suggests that deception is an endless spiralling process that eventually corrodes the soul. But it also harps on a theme that runs right throughout Mamet’s work: the notion that we use words as a destructive social camouflage to lie to others and ourselves And here through all the repetitions, half sentences and echoing encounter of one question with another, you feel the characters devalue experience through their use of language. As Del cries in desperation at the end, ‘If we could speak the truth for one instant, then we would be free.’ Mamet’s point is that we are held spiritually captive by our bluster and evasions.’ Michael Billington, The Guardian’Dense with thought, feeling and hard psychological insight There is no spare flesh on this text: words, objects, images interlock in mutual dependence which is both natural and superbly contrived.’ John Peter Sunday Times

The Old Neighborhood

‘The finest American playwright of his generation’ Sunday Times When Bobby returns to The Old Neighborhood, the people and places of his past cast shadows over the present. In a trio of interleaved scenes, The Old Neighborhood provides a rare personal insight into the world of one of America’s greatest contemporary dramatists.

Henrietta

The acclaimed dramatist who has created some of the most memorable and original films and plays of the past three decades tells a story unlike any other to flow from his prolific pen, introducing a remarkable hero*ine, Henrietta. A precocious pig pursuing the very American dream of attending Cambridge’s most esteemed law school, Henrietta must overcome the pride and prejudices of others to prove her worth and follow the noble calling in her heart. Brought to life by Elizabeth Dahlie’s heartwarming illustrations and suffused with local Cambridge color, David Mamet’s delighful fable of virtue and integrity triumphant is subtle, playful, and eccentric, tinged with satire and told with flair.

Boston Marriage

One of America’s most provocative dramatists conquers new territory with this droll comedy of errors set in a Victorian drawing room.

Anna and Claire are two bantering, scheming ‘women of fashion’ who live together on the fringes of society. Anna has just become the mistress of a wealthy man, from whom she has received an enormous emerald. Claire, meanwhile, is infatuated with a young girl and wants to enlist the jealous Anna’s help for an assignation. As the two women exchange barbs and taunt their hapless maid, Claire’s inamorata arrives and sets off a crisis that puts both the valuable emerald and the women’s future at risk. Mamet brings his trademark tart dialogue and impeccable plotting, spiced with Wildean wit, to this wickedly funny comedy.

Faustus

Having put his personal stamp on the contemporary theater, David Mamet now performs the supremely audacious feat of reinventing the theater of the past. He does so by telling his own ingenious and eerily moving version of the tragedy of Dr. Faustus.

Mamet’s Faustus like Marlowe s and Goethe s before him is a philosopher whose life s work has been the pursuit of the secret engine of the world. He is also the distracted father of a small, adoring son. Out of the clash between love and intellect and the fatal operation of Faustus pride, Mamet fashions a work that is at once caustic and heart wrenching and whose resplendent language marries metaphysics to conman s patter. A meditation on reason and folly, fathers and sons, and a breathtaking display of magic both literal and theatrical, Faustus is a triumph.

Romance

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 Fred Willard is popping antihistamines. He listens to the testimony of a Jewish chiropractor Steven Goldstein, who s a liar, according to his anti Semitic defense attorney Ed Begely Jr. The prosecutor Gordon Clapp, 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.

November

Comedy / Characters: 4m, 1f / Interiors David Mamet’s new Oval Office satire depicts one day in the life of a beleaguered American commander in chief. It’s November in a Presidential election year, and incumbent Charles Smith’s chances for reelection are looking grim. Approval ratings are down, his money’s running out, and nuclear war might be imminent. Though his staff has thrown in the towel and his wife has begun to prepare for her post White House life, Chuck isn’t ready to give up just yet. Amidst the biggest fight of his political career, the President has to find time to pardon a couple of turkeys saving them from the slaughter before Thanksgiving and this simple PR event inspires Smith to risk it all in attempt to win back public support. With Mamet’s characteristic no holds barred style, November is a scathingly hilarious take on the state of America today and the lengths to which people will go to win. ‘At once a barbarian, a bully, and an idiot ‘I always felt that I’d do something memorable I just assumed it’d be getting impeached,’ he says, Smith brings oxygen to Mamet’s rhetorical brilliance so much that Mamet seems almost giddy with pleasure as he makes his cretinous creation squirm…
Broadway comedy is generally a testament to Twain’s maxim that honesty is the best of all the lost arts. On the boulevard, laughter is meant to distract, not galvanize, to enchant, not disenchant. Into this weak hand, David Mamet has dealt an ace.’ John Lahr, The New Yorker

Keep Your Pantheon

11m / Comedy In Keep Your Pantheon, an impoverished acting company on the edge of eviction is offered a lucrative engagement. But through a series of riotous mishaps, the troupe finds its problems have actually multiplied, and that they are about to learn a new meaning for the term ‘dying on stage.’

School

Comedy / 2m / Simple Set School is a brief comic discourse on recycling, poster design and the transmission of information. Premiered with Keep Your Pantheon as Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet at the Atlantic Theater Company, NYC in the fall of 2009. ‘A textbook example of the style that made its author famous. Featuring characters identified only as A and B, as if they were points on a diagram, this merry little sketch moves with the show-off alacrity of a calculus prodigy whizzing through equations at the blackboard.’ – The New York Times

Death Defying Acts

Short Plays / Comedy / 2m, 3f / 3 ints. This long-running Off Broadway hit features the work of three gifted playwrights. David Mamet’s AN INTERVIEW is an oblique, mystifying interrogation. A sleazy lawyer is forced to answer difficult questions and to admit the truth about his life and career. The why and where of the interrogation provide a surprise ending to this brilliant twenty minute comedy. In HOTLINE by Elaine May, a neurotic woman with enough urban angst to fill a neighborhood calls a suicide crisis hotline late one night. The counselor who gets the call is overwhelmed – it is his first night on the job. This dark and desperate, wildly funny forty minute piece ends Act 1. A well to do psychiatrist has just discovered that her best friend is having an affair with her husband in Woody Allen’s wildly comic second act, CENTRAL PARK WEST. She has invited the friend over for a confrontation after getting thoroughly soused. Meanwhile, the husband is about to run off with a college student. CENTRAL PARK WEST provides an hour of constant hilarity. ‘A wealth of laughter.’-N.Y. Newsday ‘Lighter than air, an elegant diversion.’-N.Y. Times

Race

Drama / Characters: 3 males, 1 female / Interior set / Multiple Award winning playwright/director David Mamet tackles America’s most controversial topic in a provocative new tale of sex, guilt and bold accusations. Two lawyers find themselves defending a wealthy white executive charged with raping a black woman. When a new legal assistant gets involved in the case, the opinions that boil beneath explode to the surface. When David Mamet turns the spotlight on what we think but can’t say, dangerous truths are revealed, and no punches are spared. ‘Scapel edged intelligence!’ New York Times ‘Provocative and profane!’ NY 1 ‘Mamet is most concerned with the power and treachery of language: a line of dialogue vital to the prosecution case is cynically rewritten by the defense. Mamet’s larger contention is that attempts to create a more equal and tolerant society have made race an unsayable word…
brilliantly contrives here a moment in which the single most taboo sexual expletive is ignored by an audience which then gasps at the word ‘black’…
Mamet remains American theatre’s most urgent five letter word.’ The Guardian Intellectually salacious…
Gripping…
rapid fire Mametian style…
Mamet’s new play argues, everything in America and this play throws sex, rape, the law, employment and relationships into its 90 minutes of stage wrangling is still about race.’ Chcago Tribune ‘There is intrigue within intrigue, showing how personal prejudice and individual missteps govern the course of things…
Mamet adroitly mixes comic darts with tragic arrows.’ Bloomberg News

Mamet Plays: 4

A collection of outstanding plays from one of America’s greatest playwrights Cryptogram: ‘Mamet’s play suggests that deception is an endless spiralling process that eventually corrodes the soul. But it also harps on a theme that runs right throughout Mamet’s work: the notion that we use words as a destructive social camouflage to lie to others and ourselves…
And here through all the repetitions, half sentences and echoing encounter of one question with another, you feel the characters devalue experience through their use of language. As Del cries in desperation at the end, ‘If we could speak the truth for one instant, then we would be free.’ Mamet’s point is that we are held spiritually captive by our bluster and evasions.’ Michael Billington, Guardian Oleanna: ‘An exploration of male femal conflicts which cogently demonstrates that whe free thought and dialogue are imperilled, nobody wins’ Independent The Old Neighborhood: ‘Mamet, ranked with Miller, Albee and Shepard as America’s finest living playwrights, distills the raw, rank flavour of people wading down streams of consciousness…
A play of riveting disquiet’ Evening Standard

Bar Mitzvah

This beautifully produced gift book unites the words of David Mamet, America’s most active & esteemed playwright, with stunning artwork by renowned artist Donald Sultan to explore Jewish & universal themes. On the eve of his Bar Mitzvah, a boy learns about life from an old man in whose hands an antique watch reveals something of man’s relation to God. This brief tale moves on a journey from the intricacies of watchmaking to the horrors of Europe in the Holocaust, as the old man shares his understanding of life’s struggles & what it means to ”be a good Jew.” Sultan’s striking images move as gilded clocks & elaborate timepieces yield to blank watch faces, barbed wire, empty windows, & stark architectural renderings. 20 color illustrations.

Writing in Restaurants

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 bit*ch, 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.

On Directing Film

From a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright comes invaluable insights and practical instructions on the art of film directing. Mamet looks at every aspect of directing from script to cutting room and draws from a wide variety of sources to make his points.

The Cabin

‘Enormous powers of observation…
he has an ear for language.’

LA Weekly

In these mordant, elegant, and often disquieting essays, the internationally acclaimed dramatist creates a sort of autobiography by strobe light, one that is both mysterious and starkly revealing.

The pieces in The Cabin are about places and things: the suburbs of Chicago, where as a boy David Mamet helplessly watched his stepfather terrorize his sister; New York City, where as a young man he had to eat his way through a mountain of fried matzoh to earn a night of sexual bliss. They are about guns, campaign buttons, and a cabin in the Vermont woods that stinks of wood smoke and kerosene and about their associations of pleasure, menace, and regret.

The resulting volume may be compared to the plays that have made Mamet famous: it is finely crafted and deftly timed, and its precise language carries an enormous weight of feeling.

‘A very worthwhile collection…
Mamet walks a line between provocation and enticement, and its precariousness almost always compels attention.’

Newsday

‘A delight…
there is a lean, masculine quality to his essays.’

Baltimore Sun

Make Believe Town

Make Believe Town brings together David Mamet’s acute insights into everyday life, the arts, and politics. These pieces evidence Mamet’s love of language, particularly the introductory essay, ‘Eight Kings’, which celebrates the private languages of carpenters, carnival workers, and all crafts and trades, and ‘The Northern Novel’, which propounds Mamet’s affection for the line of American fiction exemplified by Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser. Some of the essays are prose portraits from Mamet’s life: ‘Deer Hunting’ and ‘The Diner’ delineate worlds far from the public eye. Make Believe Town also contains beautifully written recollections of Mamet’s early days as a writer ‘Girl Copy’, his start in the theater ‘Memories of Off Broadway’, his education as a gambler ‘Gems From a Gambler’s Bookshelf’, and bygone days on Broadway ‘Delsomma’s’. Mamet’s incisive thoughts about public issues support for the arts, nudity in films, the roles given Jewish characters, even the posthumous rehabilitation of Richard Nixon round out a far reaching collection.

True and False

The Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, director, and teacher gives us a blunt, irreverent, unsparingly honest guide to acting that overturns conventional truths and tells aspiring actors what they really need to know. David Mamet leaves no acting tenet untouched: How to judge the role, approach the part, work with the playwright. How to concentrate and think about the scene. How to avoid becoming the Paint by Numbers Mechanical Actor, the ‘How’m I Doing?’ Ham Actor, the over the top ‘Hollywood Huff ‘ Actor. The right way to undertake auditions and rehearsals. The proper approach to agents, to individual jobs, and to the business in general. The question of talent. Mamet is unmistakably clear about why he thinks actors should not be taken in by such highly touted notions as ‘the arc’ of the character or the play, ‘substitution,’ ‘sense memory,’ the Method itself in fact, by most of what is being taught in acting schools and workshops across the country today. True and False slaughters some of the profession’s most sacred cows. It is bold, witty, and likely to be as controversial as the author himself.

Three Uses of the Knife

What makes good drama? How does drama matter in our lives? In 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 as*sess, 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.

Jafsie and John Henry

A collection of Mamet’s essays, touching on his most intimate interests and obsessions. They leapfrog from Oscar Wilde to the Tower of Babel, the Committee on Un American Activities, Jewish scripture, police corruption, the art of acting, malt whisky and the charms of Edinburgh.

Directions

Compared to some of its New England neighbors, Vermont has seemed to long time resident David Mamet a place of intrinsic energy and progressiveness, love and commonality. It has lived up to the old story that settlers came up the Connecticut River and turned right to get to New Hampshire and left to get to Vermont. Is Vermont’s tradition of live and let live an accident of geography, the happy by product of 200 years of national neglect, an emanation of its Scots Irish regional character? In exploring the ways in which his decades in Vermont have shaped his character and his work, Mamet examines the intermingling of these strands and how the state s free thinking tradition can survive in an age of increasing conglomeration. The result is a highly personal and compelling portrait of a truly unique place.

Enhanced by Mamet s beautiful photographic record of Vermont, South of the Northeast Kingdom is a profound and richly textured work written with all the wit, clarity, authority of expression, and passion for truth for which Mamet is known. It is sure to move and gratify every reader, left or right, from Vermont and far beyond.

Bambi vs. Godzilla

In Bambi vs. Godzilla, David Mamet, the award winning playwright and screenwriter, gives us an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from the perspective of a filmmaker who has always played the game his own way.

Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Whose opinion matters when revising a screenplay? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what the hell do those producers do, anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and bracingly forthright answers to these and other questions about virtually every aspect of filmmaking, from concept to script to screen.

He covers topics ranging from How Scripts Got So Bad to the oxymoron of Manners in Hollywood. He takes us step by step through some of his favorite movie stunts and directorial tricks, and demonstrates that it is craft and crew, not stars and producers, that make great films. He tells us who his favorite actors and what his favorite movies are, who he thinks is the most perfect actor to grace the screen, and who he thinks should never have appeared there.

Demigods and sacred cows of the movie business beware! But for the rest of us, Mamet speaking truth to Hollywood makes for searingly enjoyable reading.

The Wicked Son

As might be expected from this fiercely provocative writer, David Mamet’s interest in anti Semitism is not limited to the modern face of an ancient hatred but encompas*ses as well the ways in which many Jews have themselves internalized that hatred. Using the metaphor of The Wicked Son at the Passover seder the child who asks, What does this story mean to you? Mamet confronts what he sees as an insidious predilection among some Jews to seek truth and meaning anywhere in other religions, in political movements, in mindless entertainment but in Judaism itself. At the same time, he explores the ways in which the Jewish tradition has long been and still remains The Wicked Son in the eyes of the world. Written with the searing honesty and verbal brilliance that is the hallmark of Mamet s work, The Wicked Son is a scathing look at one of the most destructive and tenacious forces in contemporary life, a powerfully thought provoking and important book.

Theatre

If Theatre were a religion, explains David Mamet in his opening chapter, many of the observations and suggestions in this book might be heretical. As always, Mamet delivers on his promise: in Theatre, the acclaimed author of Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed the Plow calls for nothing less than the death of the director and the end of acting theory. For Mamet, either actors are good or they are non actors, and good actors generally work best without the interference of a director, however well intentioned. Issue plays, political correctness, method actors, impossible directions, Stanislavksy, and elitists all fall under Mamet’s critical gaze. To students, teachers, and directors who crave a blast of fresh air in a world that can be insular and fearful of change, Theatre throws down a gauntlet that challenges everyone to do better, including Mamet himself.

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