David Mamet, one of the most extraordinary writers in contemporary American literature, has written twenty-three plays, eight collections of essays, two novels, five children’s books, two books of poetry, and eighteen films, including The Verdict and Wag the Dog, for which he received Academy Award nominations. State and Main is his seventh feature as a writer-director, after House of Games, Things Change, Homicide, Oleanna, The Spanish Prisoner, and The Winslow Boy. Mamet has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Glengary Glen Ross.

Ricky Jay is the acclaimed sleight-of-hand artist, actor, and author; and is the only magician ever profiled on the television series American Masters and is the subject of the documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay. He is the author of a half-dozen books on swindlers, conmen and unusual entertainers. He has appeared in seven films and three one-man shows directed by David Mamet. 

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—by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Untouchables and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright.

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. Then, again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh have known better than to trifle 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 his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era, suffused with trademark “Mamet Speak,” richness of voice, pace, and brio, and exploring—as no other 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 gusting off Lake Michigan.