November Read online

  Drama/978-0-375-70665-3

  THE CABIN

  Reminiscence and Diversions

  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.

  Memoir/Essays/978-0-679-74720-8

  THE CRYPTOGRAM

  The Cryptogram is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing—the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers. On a night in 1959 a boy is waiting to go on a camping trip with his father. A family friend is trying to entertain them—or perhaps distract them. Because in the dark corners of this domestic scene, there are rustlings that none of the players want to hear. And out of things as innocuous as a shattered teapot and a ripped blanket, Mamet re-creates a child’s terrifying discovery that the grown-ups are speaking in code, and that that code may never be breakable.

  Drama/978-0-679-74653-9

  OLEANNA

  A male college instructor and his female student sit down to discuss her grades and in a short time become participants in a modern reprise of the Inquisition. Socratic dialogue gives way to heated assault. And the relationship between this somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into a fiendishly accurate X-ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship, and abuse.

  Drama/978-0-679-74536-5

  THREE USES OF THE KNIFE

  On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

  With bracing directness, one of our greatest living playwrights addresses the questions: What makes good drama? And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment? David Mamet believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature, that we create drama out of everything from today’s weather to next year’s elections. With a cultural range that encompasses Shakespeare, Brecht, and Ibsen, Mamet shows us how to distinguish true drama from its false variants. The result is an electrifying treatise on the playwright’s art that is also a strikingly original work of moral and aesthetic philosophy.

  Drama/978-0-375-70423-9

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  Faustus, 978-1-4000-7648-2

  The Old Neighborhood, 978-0-679-74652-2

  Romance, 978-0-307-27518-9

  The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy, 978-0-375-70664-6

  True and False, 978-0-679-77264-4

  The Voysey Inheritance, 978-0-307-27519-6

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Act One

  Act Two

  Act Three