The Paris Review

You, Too, Can Live in Norman Mailer’s House

Images courtesy of Core NYC.

Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights pad is ! The fourth-floor two-bedroom apartment overlooking the promenade was first listed in 2011, but the sale fell through when the–esque prose, “with a two-story glass and wood atrium and a sloping wood ceiling recalling the curves of a grand sailboat.” Sure, as Joan Smith wrote after his death, “Mailer hated authority, homosexuality, women and almost certainly himself.” Sure, he stabbed one of his wives with a penknife, complained about the “womanization of America,” helped spring a murderer from jail, made a failed run for mayor, and declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” But the place probably isn’t haunted. Look at that . 

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Paris Review

The Paris Review19 min read
The Beautiful Salmon
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why. They jump all over the place—out of rivers, up waterfalls. Some say they jump to clean their gills. Others sa
The Paris Review1 min read
The People’s History of 1998
France won the World Cup.Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red applethough everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic.We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waitingfo
The Paris Review32 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 262
My first conversations with Jhumpa Lahiri took place in Rome this past July, in her apartment near the Janiculum, above Trastevere. It was an extremely hot summer—one of our meetings was on the hottest day in Rome’s history, 110 degrees—and we sat wi

Related Books & Audiobooks