2022-08-28: Now available for preorder from the Library of America: Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead & Selected Letters 1945-1946 (LOA #364), edited by J. Michael Lennon. From the LOA site: “To celebrate and commemorate the centennial of Mailer’s birth and the 75th anniversary of the publication of his unforgettable debut novel, this expanded collector’s edition includes a selection of 23 letters (all but four from Mailer to his first wife, Beatrice) chosen by Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon that reveals the keen insight and powerful ambition of a brilliant young writer grappling with the challenge of converting the weight of experience into art.”
2022-08-25: Middle Georgia State University has posted a blurb about the recent Lipton’s Journal excerpt published by TLS. Also, the entire article is now available on Mike Lennon’s web site.
2022-07-22: Preorder now: Robert J. Begiebing’s Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations is a new book published by Louisiana State University Press. Through six critical essays, two creative dialogues featuring Mailer with Walt Whitman and with Ernest Hemingway, and his own interview with Mailer, Begiebing reveals how Mailer’s work contributed to shaping the 20th century literary landscape and underscores how Mailer’s work can help us confront the challenges of today. Preorder: Amazon | LSU Press
2022-07-15: Rare-Book Dealer Charged After Pilfered Eagles Lyrics Come to Light. Glenn Horowitz and two other men are accused of conspiring to sell Don Henley’s notes, including the words to “Hotel California.” He placed the papers of Norman Mailer, Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker and others in leading university libraries, and brokered major deals with musicians: In 2016, he sold Bob Dylan’s vast archive to two institutions in Oklahoma for a sum estimated to be as high as $20 million.
2022-07-13: Casey Sherman tells the story of “When Kurt Vonnegut Met Norman Mailer in Cape Cod’s Legendary ‘Helltown’” in CrimeReads.
2022-07-09: The Outer Limits. In The Shores of Bohemia, John Taylor Williams explores 50 years in the iconoclastic summer colonies of Cape Cod. Book review by Andrew Sullivan.
2022-07-06: Colm Tóibín on Norman Mailer: In my mid-20s, I read a lot of Norman Mailer’s books: Armies of the Night, which is a description of the anti-Vietnam protests and another book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which is about the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions. He put himself at the centre of the picture. He was unembarrassed about this. He was a bulky, boastful figure. He was always trying to be great in some way. I admired the sense of energy in the writing, the sense of newness. The presence of the writer, how that was managed, the way he dealt with political things in a quirky and interesting way. (Via Irish Examiner.)
2022-04-04: Deadline reports that James Gray will write and direct a series about Norman Mailer based on J. Michael Lennon’s biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life. The series will be produced by Mailer Tuchman Media, run by John Buffalo Mailer.
2022-03-07: Darryl Pinckney writes “My Norman Mailer Problem—and Ours” in The Nation. He surveys the history of “The White Negro” and various contemporaneous and contemporary reactions to it.
2022-02-03: Michael Mailer writes “Canceling my father, Norman Mailer: The US needs to stop eating its own” in the Boston Globe. He argues, “It needs to stop canceling great writers who made essential contributions to our cultural vibrancy. Committing bad acts does not invalidate their cultural legacies.”
2022-02-02: David Klion, in “Norman Mailer Wasn’t Canceled,” argues the The White Negro “deserves to be studied and situated in its context rather than censored for its antiquated racial language.” He reminds those proponents of cancel culture that Mailer “captured something urgent about [his] time, challenged an older generation’s conventional wisdom, and cultivated a younger readership hungry for something vital and relevant.”
2022-01-31: Happy birthday to Norman Mailer on what would have been his 99th birthday.
2022-01-20: Michael Mailer contextualizes the latest controversy surrounding Mailer and makes an argument for publishing companies to be a place for the “free exchange of ideas” in “What Norman Mailer’s ‘Cancellation’ Reveals.” Via The Spectator.
2022-01-11: “BFG Podcast #037: Norman Mailer, ‘Don’t Look Up,’ and Losing on a Game Show” wherein renowned book critic Carolyn Kellogg joins Neal Pollack to talk about the posthumous Norman Mailer controversy, [and] Carolyn refers to the second half of Harlot’s Ghost as a great book, and says that even when she didn’t agree with Mailer’s outrageous opinions, he always gave her something interesting to argue about.
2022-01-10: “‘The White Negro’: Norman Mailer’s Essay 65 Years Later” by Peter Dreier considers Mailer’s 1957 essay in light of current events and concludes “For all its many inexcusable flaws, ‘The White Negro’ was an important essay for its time and a yardstick for measuring how we discuss race today.”
2022-01-10: “If Norman Mailer can be cancelled, no one is safe” argues Tim Black, perhaps overstating the issue based on the facts, but his point is strong. He continues: “This ought to chill the bones of anyone concerned about freedom today. Because if a figure as towering as Mailer can be cancelled, then no one, dead or alive, is safe. . . . The results of this purge of the dissenting, divergent or just plain anachronistic are all around us, on the page and lining bookstore shelves. Fiction, especially so-called literary fiction, is increasingly dull and sanitised.”
2022-01-07: “[Mailer] stalked the twentieth century like a proud satyr: hideous, provocative, funny and insightful, and always true to himself.” Read more from Tomiwa Owolade in his insightful op-ed on the Random House brouhaha.
2022-01-06: “Mailer and the Monoculture” by Geoff Shullenberger considers “The White Negro” and its continued relevance: “‘The White Negro’ was an early shot fired in what we now call the culture war. It set the agenda for debates that persist to this day, albeit in sometimes unrecognizable forms. All of this makes Mailer’s posthumous cancellation a revealing incident.”
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