La Nave di Teseo has reissued Marilyn in Italy, adding the 1973 biography to its growing Mailer list — which already includes The Naked and the Dead (2020), The Executioner’s Song (2021), and The Fight (2022). The Italian press is treating the return as the event the original publication was.
A weekly new-releases column in La Milano places the new edition alongside Richard Ford, Marguerite Yourcenar, and a clutch of Italian novels and football books, and gives it a serious four-paragraph notice. It frames Marilyn as a literary and media event on first publication, and praises Mailer for writing what it calls “a true novel in the form of a biography” — handled with the passion of a narrator and the precision of a historian.
What’s striking is how willingly the piece takes the book on Mailer’s own terms. It traces the Norma Jeane–to–icon arc without flinching from what Mailer was actually doing — not just chronicling Monroe but reintroducing her as an epic and tragic figure of the modern. And it lands where Mailer always wanted Marilyn to land: with Marilyn as the allegory of an America that builds its idols in order to consume them.
That a book this contested, fifty-three years on, is being re-released to this kind of welcome is its own small piece of news. Marilyn has had a complicated afterlife — admired, attacked, dismissed, recovered — and it remains one of the works that most clearly shows what Mailer thought biography could be made to do. Worth watching the Italian reception as Monroe’s centennial approaches on June 1.
The full roundup is at La Milano.