The Cabin. Reminiscence and Diversions

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.