The Mailer Review turns twenty this year, and today, as the Society’s conference opens in St. Pete Beach, we publish Volume 16, Special Edition: 20 Years of the Review, a festschrift for Phillip Sipiora, who founded the journal in 2006 and edited its first fifteen volumes.
Phil asked for no monument, so Matthew S. Hinton and I reminded him of the direction he guided Mailer scholarship over the last two decades. The volume gathers fifteen pieces from the Review’s first twenty years, chosen to show how Mailer studies came of age in its pages: how it moved, as our introduction puts it, from monument to method. J. Michael Lennon’s foreword tells the story of the journal’s founding; our introduction, “The Site of Memory,” explains the selection. The pieces run in five sections:
- Monument to Method, on ideology, gender, and the cultural stakes of Mailer, with Maggie McKinley, Enid Stubin, and Morris Dickstein
- Expanding the Archive, on intertexts, sources, and recovery, with J. Michael Lennon on Hemingway’s letter to Mailer, Robert J. Begiebing on Lipton’s Journal, and Michael K. Glenday on Fitzgerald and Mailer
- Genre, Form, and Method, with Jason Mosser, Gerald R. Lucas, and Nicole DePolo
- Mailer in the World, on reception and the classroom, with Heather Braun, Raj Chandarlapaty, and Barbara Wasserman
- Voice and Encounter, with Michael Chaiken’s interview with Mailer, Phillip Sipiora in conversation with J. Michael Lennon, and Lawrence Schiller on The Executioner’s Song
It is also a first for the journal: Volume 16 appears at once in print, as a PDF, in a web edition made for phones and tablets, and as an EPUB of the whole volume.
Reading it. Society members at every level receive the current volume as part of their membership, so if your dues are paid you can read Volume 16 now and download the EPUB from the issue page. Like every volume, it opens to all readers one year after publication. Libraries may subscribe for $50 a year. The fifteen volumes Phil edited are already online and free to read.
In print. Copies are at the Society table throughout the conference for $25, by card or in cash. They are limited, so find me before you pay.
My thanks to Matt Hinton, to Mike Lennon, to Giles Hoover for the design, to the contributors who let us reprint their work, and above all to Phil, whose journal this remains.