The narrator for Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest — his first novel in a decade — is a demon posing as one of Adolf Hitler's S.S. intelligence officers.

The narrator writes years later about how he guided the early life of the young Hitler, from his conception to early adolescence. Mailer's devil-narrator is smart, elegant and ironic, and recalls something of Mailer himself — since the narrator rarely meets a boundary he doesn't break.

Mailer tells Jacki Lyden about his new book, and why, as a young Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he became obsessed with Hitler and the early life of the reviled dictator.

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