The Cabin

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross: an elegant collection of essays that reveal an autobiography of an internationally acclaimed dramatist that is both mysterious and 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.