From the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of THE UNTOUCHABLES, a big shouldered, big trouble thriller set in mobbed up 1920s Chicago—a city where some people knew too much, and where everyone should have known better

CHICAGO
A Novel of Prohibition
by David Mamet
Custom House, February 2018

Mike Hodge—veteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune medium fry—probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with Annie Walsh. But maybe the guys who killed Annie Walsh shouldn’t have messed with Mike Hodge…

In CHICAGO, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic page-turner that roars through the Windy City’s underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion. Here is not only David Mamet’s first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building up to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era (among them Al Capone), suffused with the richness of voice, pace and brio that has coined the term “Mamet Speak”, and exploring–as no writer can–questions of honor, deceit, revenge and devotion, CHICAGO is that rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind off Lake Michigan.

David Mamet first won recognition with his 1976 plays “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo.” In 1984, he won the Pulitzer Prize for “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Among his many other acclaimed and prize-winning plays are “Speed the Plow”; “The Cryptogram”; and “The Old Neighborhood”. His feature film debut as a writer-director was the classic House of Games. Other films as writer-director include Things Change; Homicide; The Spanish Prisoner; State and Main; and Spartan. He has also won acclaim for numerous screenplays, including The Verdict, Wag the Dog, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Untouchables, Hoffa, and The Edge. He was the co-creator and executive producer of the CBS TV series The Unit, for which he also wrote and directed numerous episodes, and wrote and directed Phil Spector for HBO. This is his first novel in two decades.