Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel
    Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel
    Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel

    Written by Norman Mailer

    Narrated by MacLeod Andrews

    3/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male in a brilliant crime novel that transcends genre. When Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer living on Cape Cod, awakes with a gruesome hangover, a painful tattoo on his upper arm, and a severed female head in his marijuana stash, he has almost no memory of the night before. As he reconstructs the missing hours, Madden runs afoul of retired prizefighters, sex addicts, mediums, former cons, a world-weary ex-girlfriend, and his own father, old now but still a Herculean figure. Stunningly conceived and vividly composed, Tough Guys Don’t Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 20, 2016
    ISBN9781522637424
    Author

    Norman Mailer

    Norman Mailer (1923-2007) ha sido uno de los mayores escritores norteamericanos contemporáneos, así como una figura central en el panorama cultural: novelista, periodista, director de cine, activista político, aspirante a alcalde de Nueva York y enfant terrible todoterreno. Su primera novela, Los desnudos y los muertos, sobre la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que lo catapultó a la fama, ha sido publicada por Anagrama, donde también han aparecido Los ejércitos de la noche (Premio Pulitzer y National Book Award), La Canción del Verdugo (Premio Pulitzer), Oswald. Un misterio americano, Los tipos duros no bailan, El parque de los ciervos, El Evangelio según el Hijo, El fantasma de Harlot, ¿Por qué estamos en guerra?, América y El castillo en el bosque.

    More audiobooks from Norman Mailer

    Related to Tough Guys Don't Dance

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Ten Essential Noir Novels

      May 26, 2021

      Those books were about psychologically damaged people trying to navigate a cruel, cutthroat world. And they were written by what seemed to me psychologically damaged writers. It felt like I’d found a home. The post Ten Essential Noir Novels appeared

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Masochism And Despair In The Village Of The Damned

      Jun 20, 2022

      In Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh offers a fitting tale for the hellscape of our pandemic times; gleefully rubbing our faces in the filth of human nature. Her chosen setting – the imagined village of Lapvona – harks back to the age of medieval fiefdoms an

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tom Cunliffe

      May 3, 2024

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rock ‘n’ Roll Retirement

      Mar 6, 2024

      I heard the news today. Then I rolled over and went back to sleep. Allegedly, I have retired – well, not quite. A year ago, I moved from rural France to Riverstone in Fulham. It's a new agerestricted (65+) retirement community next to the Thames. Com

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tom Cunliffe

      May 3, 2024

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What Ray Charles Says

      Mar 1, 2024

      The nighttime is the right time to be with the one you love, says Ray,but according to Hamlet, it’s when “churchyards yawn and hell itselfbreathes out contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,”says Hamlet, “and do such bitter business as

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Dan Patlansky

      Mar 3, 2022

      Dan Patlansky
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Dan Patlansky

      Mar 3, 2022

      Dan Patlansky
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Road to Paradise and Back

      Dec 1, 2022

      The Road to Paradise and Back
      23 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      Pallets of bottled water on the back porchwere one evidence of apocalypseor the demise of the way of thingsor lazily written computer code backin the 80s, when I was a boyand the nightly news was just about all the doomwe had stomachs for, whenwere t

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

      Sep 8, 2020

      All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Paul Heiney

      Oct 27, 2023

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Beauty In Lying To Yourself

      Nov 1, 2021

      The Beauty In Lying To Yourself
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Paul Heiney

      Oct 27, 2023

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      From: “Gravity Archives”

      Sep 3, 2024

      1. Jetlagged visitor in London dark awry with first light catastrophic: tender welts and bruises, smears of iodine, bare bones scraped fleshless, fallen anyhow. What disaster fell and welters out of sight? But day distracts. Cold tube train wheels sq

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      OFF THE Leash

      Sep 10, 2024

      OFF THE Leash
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The End Of The Road

      Jul 15, 2020

      The End Of The Road
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Sex In A Pandemic

      Jan 16, 2021

      Sex In A Pandemic
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cross My Heart

      Sep 1, 2022

      Cross My Heart
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Nick Barrett

      Mar 5, 2020

      Nick Barrett
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Seven New Poems By Walt Whitman …

      Dec 3, 2018

      Sometimes I dream that I am not Walt Whitman,That I am an engineer, or an airplane pilot,Or a schoolteacher, or a soldier, or a traveling salesman,Not a poet living his afterlife through his poems. I enjoy those dreams. I enjoy waking to find they we

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rock It And See

      Jul 4, 2024

      Rock It And See
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Tough Guys Don't Dance

    3/5

    180 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Set in 1984 in a New England seaside resort once the tourist season has finished,The main character is Tim Madden he wakes up covered in blood after a very heavy drunken night..
      A woman's head is discovered where he grows his hash, then another head.
      He doesn't think he committed these murders.
      There are a few dodgy characters and the chief of Police is actually the murderer.
      Very confusing book, I didn't like the characters and was glad to finish it.
    • 4/5
      Tim Madden awakens from a night of drunken excess, still groggy and unable to recall anything of last night.
      As the hangover clears he finds his car's passenger seat sticky with blood, a new tattoo with an old flame's name and the discovery of not one but two severed heads in the nearby woods, next to his secret marijuana stash.
      Was he responsible for the murder of two women, or was the crooked police chief setting him up? Madden, a failed writer, has the story of a life time to write if he can sleuth his way through it and live. A couple of ex-cons and a pissed off homosexual, his own former cell-mate, all want him dead.
      In Tough Guys Don't Dance, Mailer gives us many colorful characters, in his usual descriptive style, but don't be fooled. Through all the hard-nosed Irish and Portuguese on the streets of Cape Cod this book is worht the read for the flowing narrative language alone, and besides Madden is a tough guy, so why not give him the last dance.
    • 2/5
      Norman Mailer was quite a gifted writer. I say that having actually only read in full one of his books, this one. I have read excerpts of several of his other books and writings, and having also read in its entirety his recently published collected letters. The man had talent with the written word. He also had imagination, being able to craft a complex story and tell it from the perspective of a narrator who is fully immersed in that story.

      The problem, the singular problem with this book, is it's completely amoral position in regard to all of action of the story, action which has a decidedly moral aspect to it. The story is full of sex and violence yet not a one of the characters, form the narrator on down, ever seem to have a second thought about it. It happened. They did it. And then they proceed to whatever happens next.

      This book was written 31 years ago, so it is unlikely that a review written at this late date will carry any weight. In a sense this book is totally post-modern in its outlook on life. There is no sense of right or wrong, of good or bad, according to any standards outside those of the character at the moment. I usually pass along books I have read to a person or place where they may find another reading. Not this one. My copy has been removed from circulation, so to speak. Save yourself from wasting your time. If you want to read Mailer then pick something else. Myself, I haven't given up. I'm going to try to find a copy of the Executioner's Song.
    • 3/5
      A murder mystery that had the potential to be well done but failed in the end. Set in Provincetown, RI where Tim Madden is in a bit of depression from his wife having left him recently. He begins his night in a bar where he begins talking with a couple only to discover that in the morning they are both missing. Unable to remember the previous nights happenings he discovers the seat of his car is covered in blood and his arm stings from a tattoo with the name of a previous lover. He begins to piece together events of the night but he is still in a fog as to what occurred. The plot becomes entangled with corrupt police, criminals, and past lovers, all of which have a role to play. The book began out very intense but by the end I thought this was too unbelievable and was sadly disappointed. Plus it is very sexually explicit with many details I don't care to read about (skipped over those parts) and were in no real relevance to the story except to say that certain characters were sex addicts.
    • 2/5
      Not much fun and not much of a mystery. I can't for the life of me think of why Mailer would have taken what must have been at least a certain amount of time to write this book. For money is the only answer I can come up with. Did he make any? I guess so, since they made a movie out of it and that must have put something into his pocket.