Norman Mailer Society/News/2017

• 2017-10-25: Minutes of the 2016 Business Meeting of the Norman Mailer Society; Minutes of the 2016 Meeting of the Executive Board of the Norman Mailer Society
• 2017-10-22: Norman Mailer comes to the Library of America in two volumes: Four Book soft the 1960s and Collected Essays of the 1960s. “No writer plunged more vigorously into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, fearlessly revolutionizing literary norms and genres to capture the decade’s political, social, and sexual explosions.”
• 2017-09-19: Anne Wood profiles Mailer’s sister: “Barbara Wasserman has been coming to Provincetown for 63 years.” Thanks, Anne.
• 2017-09-10: In “A Village Voice Reunion, and Nobody Got Punched,” John Leland writes, “Beer, cold pizza, French literary references — it could only be a reunion for The Village Voice, the 62-year-old alt-weekly newspaper that is scheduled to end print publication after Sept. 20.”
• 2017-09-04: Join us in D.C. for the 50th anniversary of the March on the Pentagon, October 20–21, in Washington D.C. Co-sponsored by the NMS.
• 2017-08-24: After more than 60 years, the Village Voice is shutting down its weekly print edition.
• 2017-08-16: Boris Kachka considers “What the Departure of the Times’ Michiko Kakutani Means for Books Coverage” in New York. At the Times, remembers James Atlas, “she reached a point where she could be eviscerating” of any writer, no matter how powerful, “Mailer being a prime example. People were afraid. I was afraid.”
• 2017-08-14: The Daily News revisits “When Mailer and Breslin ran a stunt-filled NYC political campaign.” They had to be kidding. They weren’t really serious. Were they? Norman Mailer running for mayor of New York?
• 2017-06-28: Colum McCann to Speak at Conference 2017. We are pleased to announce the keynote speaker at the 2017 Mailer Society conference will be Colum McCann. An admirer of Mailer’s work, he met Mailer in 2006 in Provincetown, and in 2009 wrote a brilliant introduction to Moonfire, the Taschen edition of Of a Fire on the Moon. He is the author of six novels and three collections of stories.
• 2017-04-04: “Donald Trump: A bigger “factoid” president than Nixon?” David Masiotra writes, “Norman Mailer coined the word ‘factoid’ in 1973 to describe ideas or information perceived by the public as facts but actually dubious or instruments of obfuscation. Writing in his brilliant and almost psychedelic biography of Marilyn Monroe, Mailer described an earlier book on the Hollywood starlet as a ‘book with facts embellished by factoids, that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.’”
• 2017-02-10: In “It’s Norman Mailer vs. Feminists in ‘The Town Hall Affair’,” Ben Brantley writes, “As for Norman Mailer, the M.C. of this fraught dialogue (which was convened in response to ‘The Prisoner of Sex,’ his pugilistic essay on feminism in Harper’s Magazine), he’s really beside himself. When the show begins, Norman Mailer is seated next to the person he most admires, Norman Mailer. He and he are portrayed by Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos. (Wouldn’t you know it would take two actors to contain all that testosterone?)”
• 2017-02-11: David Light asks that you become a member of the Norman Mailer Society.
• 2017-01-16: In his interview with Michiko Kakutani, Barack Obama mentions The Naked and the Dead first thing. Obama: “I loved reading when I was a kid, partly because I was traveling so much, and there were times where I’d be displaced, I’d be the outsider. . . . And so the idea of having these worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into, was appealing to me.”