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To celebrate Mailer’s centenary and their publication of The Naked and the Dead, the Library of America has posted a page with links for Mailer’s life and work. They write: Below, we collect a handful of Mailer-related writings, interviews, videos, and scholarly resources from across the web that
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Edited by John Buffalo Mailer and J. Michael Lennon, A Mysterious Country collects Mailer’s commentary on the grace and fragility of democracy, 80 excerpts, 1945-2007, from his books, essays, interviews and letters, many of them uncollected or unpublished. The book is out tomorrow in hardback from Arcade Books; order
Legacy
Taki, writing for the Spectator in Australia simultaneously disses the latest “hatchet job” biography of Mailer and gives reasons why we should still be reading writers like him and Hemingway. He begins with my current favorite sentence: “Norman Mailer was born on 31 January 1923, and as his 100th birthday
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With Mailer’s 100 birthday approaching, Philip Martin writes an overview of Mailer’s life and highlights recent publications, arguing: He was a technician of language whose sentences would wend like long, slow-burning fuses, exploding at the end. You could find beauty in his most boorish arguments, if you were
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In this morning’s San Antonio Express-News, Rafael Castillo pays homage to Mailer for his up-coming centenary. Castillo writes: A rabble-rouser to the end, Mailer was founder of the Village Voice and a pioneer in New Journalism who embodied all the excesses and extremes of American society. Married and divorced
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Today's The Ohio Star recommends The Naked and the Dead for its “timeless themes and insight into reality, in addition to being enjoyable tales in [its] own right.” They continue: Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and
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Another not-so-favorable review of Bradford’s new biography of Mailer appears today in The Guardian. Peter Conrad’s subtitle says it all: The Naked and the Dead author was a brash and infuriating personality, but he deserves better than this dismissive biography, published to mark the centenary of his birth.
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Showbiz Cheat Sheet’s Elise Nelson reminisces about the time Norman Mailer guest starred on Gilmore Girls and explains why Mailer was able to improvise lines when others were forbidden from doing so. In the episode (Season 5 Episode 6, “Norman Mailer, I’m Pregnant!”), Mailer was being interviewed by
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In today's Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks reviews the new Library of America volume Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead & Selected Letters 1945-1946. Sacks writes: That debut was sometimes criticized for its pessimism, but rereading it in this anniversary edition left me with a different impression.
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Today’s National Review has a dual review featuring J. Michael Lennon’s new memoir Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature and Richard Bradford’s new biography Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer. Of the former, reviewer Robert Dean Lurie writes: Mailer’
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Esquire has compiled a list of “the best books to give as gifts”: “The writers behind our 2022 Esquire Book Club selections—George Saunders, John Waters, Emily St. John Mandel, and more—divulge what to buy for every reader on your list.” Number 2 on the list is The Fight.
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Society member and scholar Robert J. Begiebing has written “The best books to start reading Norman Mailer” on Shepherd. Begiebing writes: Mailer’s novels from the 1960s-2007 are notoriously challenging, and I’ve seen readers wanting to see what Mailer is about sometimes make the mistake of starting with one