The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Norman Mailer: Supplemental Bibliography Through 2006

(Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press 2000) by J. Michael and Donna Pedro Lennon left off at the end of 1998. It consists of chronologically listed entries of significant works by and about that have appeared from that time through 2006. In addition, entries for a number of items that appeared from 1980–1998, items unknown or unavailable to the Lennons at the time their bio-bibliography was published, have been added. This checklist is, therefore, a supplement to Works and Days, although it cannot claim to be comprehensive. Many brief interviews, joint letters to the editor, ephemera, and Mailer quotations of uncertain authenticity in the popular press and Internet have been passed over; others have certainly been missed. Doubtless some significant secondary works have not been located. Entries for these and for the continuing stream of narratives, essays, interviews, poems, letters to the editor, and drawings by Mailer will eventually be gathered, it is hoped, into a successor volume to Works and Days. Annotations have been provided for all items by Mailer, but not for most secondary items. Apology is made to those whose essays or monographs about and interviews with Mr. Mailer have escaped attention.
== 1982 ==
=== Secondary ===
 220 pp., indexed.
== 1986 ==
=== Secondary ===
== 1988 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Interviews ====
“Norman Mailer: The Tough Guy Is Really a Cuddly Jewish Teddy Bear.” Profile-interview by Pearl Sheffy Gefen. Lifestyles (International Edition) 92 (1988), 60, 62–64. During a visit to Toronto to launch his film, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” Mailer is interviewed by this Jewish cultural magazine, headquartered in Ottawa. He speaks about the film, but also makes extended comments on his Jewishness.” He says, “Being Jewish is a whole inner way of life, and the Holocaust took away any possibility of telling myself I wasn’t Jewish.”
=== Secondary ===
== 1989 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
Introduction to Messages: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1989, by Luke Breit, 5–8. Fort Bragg, CA: Q. E. D. Press, 1989. Soft cover. Mailer praises Breit (the son of the late Harvey Breit) for being “one of the best romantic poets we’ve got” and for giving him a lift. “Luke Breit is Doctor Breit, Traffic Consultant for locked-up synapses and fucked-up grace.”
=== Secondary ===
 Reprinted in Bloom, 2003.
== 1990 ==
=== Secondary ===
 Reprinted in Bloom, 2003.
== 1991 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
Foreword to Presences: Photographs of Heaton Hall, by Beverly Anoux Pabst. Torino, Italy, Stamperia Artistica Nazionale, 1991. Soft cover, no pagination. In his evocative three-page foreword, Mailer calls Pabst’s 45 photographs of this empty (and later razed) resort hotel in the Berkshires “the spookiest book of photographs I have seen,” and “one of the more eloquent.” He also makes the claim that “in searching for the occult, a photograph can be of more use than a painting.”
=== Secondary ===
 579 pp., indexed.
== 1992 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Interviews ====
“Waiting for Mailer’s Big One.” Article-interview by Gregory Feeley. Million: The Magazine about Popular Fiction (U.K.), no. 7 (January–February 1992), 38–42. The focus of Feeley’s comments and questions in this important piece is the many novels Mailer planned but did not write, including the “big novel” about death he worked on in the late 1950s, the sequels to Ancient Evenings, the biker novel he started in 1966 and an autobiographical novel which had its origins, Mailer says, in “the saga of the Mailer family back in Russia with my grandfather as I imagined him.” He abandoned it after reading the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
“Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Vision.” Interview by Eric James Schroeder. In Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, edited by Eric James Schroeder, 90–105. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992. One of 11 interviews in this collection, including those with Michael Herr, Robert Stone, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tim O’Brien, and Larry Heinemann. Contains extended discussion of the Vietnam War, WWII, and three of Mailer’s books: The Naked and the Dead, Why Are We in Vietnam?, and The Armies of the Night. Mailer also discusses with some prescience the small wars of the future. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2003, (see above).
=== Secondary ===
 (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy; Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song; Richard Wright, Native Son.
== 1993 ==
=== Secondary ===
 352 pp., indexed. Krassner, editor of The Realist, published several pieces by Mailer in the 1950s and 1960s.
 270 pp., unindexed.
== 1994 ==
=== Secondary ===
 292 pp., indexed.
 252 pp., unindexed. Reprinted in Bloom, 2003.
== 1995 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“Tolstoy and Chekov.” Paris Review 137 (winter 1995), 48–49. Mailer recounts a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a conversation between the two great Russian writers.
==== Interviews ====
“Norman Mailer: Taking Stock and Taking Aim.” Article-interview by Divina Infusino. American Way 28 (15 June 1995), 54–57, 82–83, 87. Most of this interview deals with the recently published Oswald’s Tale, but Mailer also discusses television, family, marijuana use, and his films.
=== Secondary ===
== 1996 ==
=== Secondary ===
 192 pp., indexed.
== 1997 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“Friendly Legend: Tributes to Ginsberg.” Rolling Stone, 29 May 1997, 40–43. Along with William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Gregory Corso, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono and several others, Mailer offers a brief valedictory comment on the late poet, lauding his courage at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
==== Interviews ====
“A Minority of One: An Interview with Norman Mailer.” By Christopher Hitchens. New Left Review, no.22 (March/April 1997), 115–28. Wide-ranging and thoughtful probing of Mailer’s political commitments and how they have evolved in the face of assassinations, the end of the cold war, and the growing power of corporations. Mailer’s relations with his mentor, Jean Malaquais, and his views of Presidents Reagan and Clinton are also considered.
“A Conversation with Norman Mailer and Dr. Christopher M. Leighton.” Undated, but obviously from the period just after the publication of Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son on May 02, 1997. In this transcribed telephone interview, Leighton, a theologian, presses Mailer on his motives for writing the narrative and what effects his retelling will have on Jews and Christians. Along the way, Mailer reveals a good deal about his own Jewishness, including his Jewish and Yiddish language study and his reading of Graetz’s five-volume history of the Jews. Important interview.
=== Secondary ===
 497 pp., indexed.
 1997. 179 pp., indexed.
== 1998 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“Clinton for Pres. No, Not You, Bill: Hillary, Your Country Needs You.” The Observer (London), 8 February 1998, 1, 4. Essay (with editor’s title). Written in the wake of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, this 2500-word polemic underlines Mrs. Clinton’s desire for power~“vast and huge”! and criticizes her husband’s “failure to achieve greatness; and this not through a lack of talent but by inanition of character.”
“At the Point of My Pen.” In Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, edited by Will Blythe, 3–4. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Mailer leads off this collection of essays by 26 writers, including Rick Bass, Robert Stone, Richard Ford, and Jayne Anne Phillips. He retells the story of what his mentor and friend Jean Malaquais told him about why he persisted in writing even though it was torture: “The only time I know the truth,” Malaquais said, “is when it reveals itself at the point of my pen.” Mailer says he has been “thinking about Malaquais’ answer for forty years” and finds it to be “incontestably true.”
=== Secondary ===
 176 pp., unindexed.
 506 pp. Mailer’s relations with Styron and James Jones are discussed at length in Chapter 21, “Mailer and Others,” based in part on an interview with Mailer.
== 1999 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“Milosevic and Clinton.” Washington Post, 24 May 1999, A25. In this 1500-word essay, Mailer criticizes the Clinton Administration’s bombing campaign in Kosovo and argues that the canny Milosevic duped Sec. of State Madeleine Albright. In support of his argument, he explores “the visceral difference between a combat devoted uniquely to bombing, and participation in a ground war.”
“Norman Mailer.” In For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love the Most, edited by Ronald B. Shwartz, 158–59. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1999. Mailer lists the following, one through six: U.S.A., Studs Lonigan, Das Kapital, The Decline of the West, Anna Karenina, and Look Homeward, Angel. In a postscript, he notes that with the exception of Das Kapital, he had read all the others before the age of twenty.
“Norman Mailer’s Ten Favorite American Novels.” In A Passion for Books: A Book Lover’s Treasury, edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, 222. New York: Times Books/Random House, 1999. Mailer makes no comment, but provides the following list, from one to ten: U.S.A., The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Look Homeward, Angel, The Grapes of Wrath, Studs Lonigan, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Appointment in Samarra, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Moby-Dick.
====Interviews====
“Postwar Paris: Chronicles of Literary Life.” Paris Review, no.150 (spring 1999): 266–312. Twenty-one individuals reflect on Paris after WWII in this evocative symposium, including Evan S. Connell, Kaylie Jones, Rick Bass, Mary Lee Settle, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and James Dickey. The piece leads off with the comments of Mailer, poet Richard Wilbur, and Mailer’s authorized biographer, Robert F. Lucid, taken from a transcription of their conversation about Paris at an event honoring Lucid’s retirement from the University of Pennsylvania in September 1996. Mailer’s reminiscences deal with the mood of Paris in 1947, the writers he met there and the 1948 presidential election, in which Mailer supported Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate.
“A Conversation with Norman Mailer.” By J. Michael Lennon. New England Review 20 (summer 1999), 138–48. In mid-March 1998 in Provincetown, Mailer spoke of the genesis of The Time of Our Time and the relative merits of his fiction and nonfiction narratives, with briefer comments on early fame and the cold war. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art (2003).
“Interview with Norman Mailer.” By Christopher Busa. Provincetown Arts 14 (summer 1999), 24–32. In a major interview by Mailer’s Provincetown neighbor and editor of this magazine, Mailer speaks longer and with more detail and nuance about what Provincetown has meant to him as an artist than anywhere else. It also includes a lengthy discussion of The Gospel According to the Son and Ancient Evenings.
“My Moment with Mailer.” Boston Phoenix, 3 September 1999, 28–30, 32. Article-interview by Chris Wright. Reprinted in Providence Phoenix, 10–16 September 1999. Contains an account of Mailer’s appearance at a symposium in Provincetown, and an earlier conversation with Wright. Wright’s introduction is padded, but Mailer provides some good insights on then and now in American life, aging and the clarity that comes with it, with asides on the corporation, politics, and plastics.
=== Secondary ===
 Includes useful bibliography. 478 pp. indexed (see 9 January 2000 Mailer letter below).
 850 pp., indexed.
 244 pp., indexed.
 310 pp., indexed.
 Review of The Gospel According to the Son.
 333 pp., indexed. Greer appeared with Mailer in Donn Pennebaker’s 1972 documentary, Town Bloody Hall.
== 2000 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“Just the Factoids.” Letter to the Editor. New York Times Book Review, 9 January 2000, 4. Mailer corrects three of the most egregious errors in Mary Dearborn’s biography in this column-and-a-half letter: 1) that he had never read the works of Karl Marx; 2) that he shunned his friend Buzz Farbar after he was imprisoned on a drug charge; 3) that he shared his home in Provincetown with Roy Cohn. He goes on to say that he did not read her biography, but gleaned these and several other errors from a review in Lingua Franca by Caleb Crain. Further, he states that the errors were “in some degree my fault since I did not choose to be interviewed, but I still wish that Mary Dearborn had tried to get at least two sources for each of her assertions.”
Letter to the Editor. New York Times, 22 March 2000. In this brief letter, Mailer comments on Sen. Robert Byrd’s 20 March Op-Ed piece in the Times, noting that “the United States and NATO stepped into the trap that Mr. Milosevic had set” when it began its 78-day bombing campaign.
==== Interviews ====
“One Helluva Guy.” Article-interview by Ginny Dougary. The Times 2 (U.K.), 2 June 2000, 3–7. Cover story. Well-written account of Dougary’s meeting with Mailer in Provincetown. Mailer was clearly comfortable with her, discussing his three-week stay in Bellevue in 1960, his marriage with Jeanne Campbell (and marriage generally), his affairs and diminishing libido. The piece is slugged on the cover of the magazine as “madness, women and every man’s terror,” a good summary.
“Still Stormin.” Article-interview by Alastair McKay. The Scotsman: S2 Weekend, 22 July 2000, 1–5. Cover story. Discussion in Provincetown of drugs, feminism, the corporation, and fame; no new ground broken, but some lively re-statements. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2003.
“God’s Foot Soldier.” Article-interview by David Aaronovitch. Independent on Sunday (U.K.), 20 August 2000, 4–5. Aaronovitch has difficulty understanding Mailer’s ideas of an existential God who is in danger of dying (or he feigns puzzlement well), but Mailer does re-state his theology quite clearly in this piece, based on a 14 August interview in Edinburgh where Mailer appeared at the International Book Festival.
“Norman Mailer Interview.” Article-interview by Romona Koval, presenter of the Australian program, Radio National’s Books and Writing. Based on an interview with Mailer at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. First broadcast on 1 September 2000. Internet printout is 12 pages in length. Many subjects are tackled in this omnibus interview, including the new journalism, first and third person points of view, feminism and the sexual revolution, the 2000 presidential election, boxing, Mailer’s engineering education, and what it means to be a left conservative. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2003.
=== Secondary ===
 Reviews of The Essential Mailer (a British compilation of Existential Errands and The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer), Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Oswald’s Tale.
 250 pp., unindexed. Athill was Mailer’s editor at his British publisher, Andre Deutsch, in the 1960s.
 811 pp., indexed.
 294 pp., indexed.
 Review.
 Wolfe’s rebuttal of negative reviews of his novel A Man in Full by Mailer, John Irving, and John Updike. Wolfe calls Mailer “an envious bag of bones” in this essay; Mailer later replied that, yes, he was a bag of bones, but if he was envious, it was not of Wolfe, but Tolstoy.
== 2001 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
Foreword to Enduring Justice. Photographs by Thomas Roma, 7. New York: Powerhouse Books, 2001. To this collection of 84 empathetic photographs made in the Brooklyn Criminal Court Building from 1997 to 1999, Mailer contributes a one-page essay on the many meanings of justice: “Justice is the smell in the smoke of the bail bondsman’s cheap cigar as the fumes drift down the dire corridors.”
The Wisdom of a Serious Redneck’: Norman Mailer Remembers Jones at the 1999 JJLS Symposium.” James Jones Literary Society Newsletter 10 (fall 2001), 2–4. Remarks made by Mailer about James Jones at the James Jones Literary Society symposium at Long Island University in the fall of 1999, edited by J. Michael Lennon.
“An Exchange between Norman Mailer and Stanley Kunitz.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 63, nos. 1–2 (autumn 2001–winter 2002), 117–20. Two letters from Mailer and one from Kunitz concerning the mistaken notion that Kunitz was bad-mouthing Marilyn: A Novel Biography.
==== Interviews ====
“Norman Mailer: A Literary Lion Roars.” Article-interview by Carolyn T. Hughes. Poets and Writers Magazine 29 (March/April 2001), 40–45. Focus is on the writing life, its rewards and punishments, with interesting asides on Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, and Stendhal. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2002.
“Norman Mailer: Stupidity Brings Out Violence in Me.” Interview by Lawrence Groebel. In Endangered Species: Writers Talk about Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives, edited by Lawrence Groebel, 289–316. Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 2001. Focus is on violence, the craft of writing, and Mailer’s views of several other writers, Vidal and Capote, most notably. Excerpts reprinted in The Spooky Art, 2003.
“Tough Guys Don’t Twitch.” Article by Sebastian Smee. Panorama Ansett, August 2001, 24–29. Account of Mailer’s appearance with Martin Amis at the second New Yorker Festival, where they both read from their work.
=== Secondary ===
 Many Mailer references and quotes.
== 2002 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“For Whom the Will Toils.” Letter to the Editor. Boston Globe, 14 March 2002, A14. Mailer coruscates George F. Will for equating the prose of Pres. George W. Bush with that of Ernest Hemingway, saying that to put Bush “next to Hemingway is equal to saying that Jackie Susann is right up there with Jane Austen.”
Into the Mirror: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen, by Lawrence Schiller, New York: HarperCollins, early May 2002. 317 pp. Based on an Investigation by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller. Schiller transformed Mailer’s screenplay for a four-hour television miniseries, titled Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story, into this narrative, which appeared before the miniseries aired on 10 and 17 November 2002. Mailer and Schiller performed a lengthy investigation for the project, including a trip to Russia to speak with Hanssen’s KGB handlers.
“Manso’s Many Untruths.” Letter to the Editor. Provincetown Banner, 16 May 2002, 8. Mailer comments here on Sue Harrison’s Banner review of Peter Manso’s portrait of Provincetown in his Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape (see below): “I will now state that every remark or action he has attributed to me that I have read about ... is wholly and totally untrue.” Mailer goes on to say that his “private term” for Manso, who compiled a controversial oral biography of Mailer (Mailer: His Life and Times, 1985), “might be ‘poison-drip’.”
“A Founding Father Expresses Outrage.” Letter to the Editor. Cape Cod Voice, 5–18 December 2002, 47. In a brief letter, Mailer, who named The Village Voice in 1955, expressed his support for this Cape Cod paper, which was sued
by The Village Voice for name infringement. The Village Voice lost.
Foreword to Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult, by Peter Levenda, 1–4. 2nd ed. New York Continuum, 2002. Mailer notes that he has read Levenda’s book three times and gives an enthusiastic endorsement to his detailed exploration of the occultists who interacted with the Nazis.
“Norman Mailer.” In John Steinbeck: Centennial Reflections by American Writers, edited by Susan Shillinglaw, 62. San Jose, CA: San Jose State University, 2002. In a 129-word contribution, Mailer expresses his admiration for Steinbeck, especially for his “marvelous and ironic sense of compassion, never sentimental but daring all the time.”
==== Interviews ====
“The Mailer Verdict.” Interview by Dotson Rader. Sunday Times Magazine (London), 19 September 2002. Mailer explains what he felt on 9/11 in a long, wide-ranging discussion that covers its effects on Americans, Muslim societies and why they hate western nations, terrorism and evil, the American infatuation with the flag, the fragility of democracy, and three presidents: Carter, Bush, and Clinton. Much of the interview was later incorporated into Why Are We at War? (see below).
“I Am Not for World Empire: A Conversation with Norman Mailer about Iraq, Israel, the Perils of Technology and Why He Is a Left-Conservative.” By Kara Hopkins, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodoracopulos. American Conservative, 2 December 2002, 8–18. Long, impassioned discussion in Provincetown of the impending war with Iraq, with lengthy digressions on technology, the nature of American conservatism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Later incorporated into Why Are We at War?
=== Secondary ===
 Soft cover. 242 pp., indexed.
 Discussion of how Mailer and Schiller are collaborating on the book Into the Mirror about FBI agent Robert Hanssen.
 Soft cover. Contains chapter on Mailer scholarship. 195 pp., indexed.
 335 pp., indexed (see 16 May 2002 Mailer letter above).
== 2003 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Books and Pamphlets ====
The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. Edited by J. Michael Lennon. New York: Random House, 31 January 2003 (Mailer’s 80th birthday). Miscellany, 330 pp., $24.95. Dedication: “To J. Michael Lennon.” Soft cover edition appeared later in 2003. A compilation taken from nearly 200 previously published works by Mailer and 50 previously unpublished or newly written items, edited and organized under six topical headings: Lit Biz, Craft, Psychology, Philosophy, Genre, and Giants, this last consisting of comment on Tolstoy, Twain, Hemingway, Henry James, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Dreiser, Bellow, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen and several other writers. Contains extensive source notes, acknowledgements and an index. “Birds and Lions: Writing from the Inside Out,” an advance excerpt, appeared in The New Yorker, 23–30 December 2002, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 84.
Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings. New York: Random House, spring, 2003. 275 pp., $14.95. Dedication: “To Norris.” Acknowledgements: “I would like to thank David Ebershoff, Dwayne R. Prickett, Danielle Mailer, J. Michael Lennon and Judith McNally for their careful reading and criticism of this book.” Soft cover. A reprint of the majority of Mailer’s poems (some revised) from two earlier works: his 1962 collection of poems, Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters), and his 1966 miscellany, Cannibals and Christians, along with a suite of eight new poems collectively titled “Hemingway Revisited.” The Hemingway poems also appeared in Paris Review (see below). Interspersed with the poems are about 100 of Mailer’s captioned and humorous line drawings of faces, most of which are obliquely related to the poems. He also includes his introduction to the 1971 soft cover edition of Deaths for the Ladies published by New American Library.
Why Are We at War? New York: Random House, April 2003. Essay and interviews. 111 pp., $7.99. Dedication: “To Norris.” Soft cover. A polemic against the Iraq War assembled from two interviews and a speech from the period September 2002 to February 2003 (see below).
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“Mailer Erupts: Bush Needs a War Because America Needs an Empire.” Daily Telegraph (London), 21 February 2003, 22–23. Consists of the transcript of a long speech Mailer gave on 20 February at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on what he sees as the greatest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century—and what can be done to meet it. The New York Review of Books reprinted the speech as “Only in America” in its 27 March 2003 number. The Commonwealth Club’s magazine, The Commonwealth, also reprinted the speech with the same title in its 15 April 2000 issue, accompanied by the Q and A session in San Francisco with Barbara Lane that followed it in which Mailer speaks of celebrity, reviewers, marriage, and his relationship with Gore Vidal. Finally, a large part of the speech was used in Why Are We at War? (see above).
“Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy.” International Herald Tribune, 25 February 2003. Essay of approximately 500 words in which Mailer again attacks the Bush administration “for moving in an imperial direction.” His comments are excerpted from a 22 February speech at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.
“We Went to War Just to Boost the White Male Ego.” The Times (London), 29 April 2003, 20. Essay of approximately 1500 words in which Mailer argues that Pres. Bush went to war because “we very much needed a war” to offset the sinking economy, the loss of face resulting from scandals in the Catholic Church, U.S. corporations, and the FBI, and behind all this, was the need to bolster the sagging machismo of white American males. An expanded version of this essay appeared in the New York Review of Books, 7 July 2003, under the title “The White Man Unburdened.” On 14 August 2003, the Review published a response to Mailer’s essay by Roland Tiersky, and Mailer’s 1200-word reply.
“A Riff on Hemingway.” Paris Review, no. 167 (fall 2003), 267–70. 50th Anniversary Number. Poems (with editor’s title). Reprinted from Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (see above), where the poems appear in a slightly different form. It is possible that these poems were submitted to Paris Review well before Modest Gifts was published.
==== Interviews ====
“Norman Mailer: Writer.” V Magazine, no. 21 (January/February 2003), 8. Interview by Christopher Bollen. Focus is on The Spooky Art, its genesis and examination of the writing life. Mailer also looks back at earlier works: The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night, and The Executioner’s Song.
“Old Brawler Won’t Grapple with History: Norman Mailer Ruminates on Literature and Life.” Article-interview by Julie Salamon. New York Times, 22 January 2003, E1, E10. On the eve of his 80th birthday and the publication of The Spooky Art, Mailer talks in Provincetown about the coming war in Iraq and the diminishing power of the novel to affect the life of a nation: “The novel now rides in a sidecar.” Accompanied by a harshly negative review of The Spooky Art by Michiko Kakutani, one in a long line of negative reviews from Mailer’s bête noir among reviewers.
“You’re in the Lap of History.” Interview by Malcolm Jones. Newsweek, 27 January 2003, 62–64, 66. Another Provincetown interview occasioned by the publication of The Spooky Art, with comment on the fiction/nonfiction debate, Iraq, and the Jack Abbott affair. Accompanied by quotes from The Spooky Art, 2003.
Yes, I Misbehaved Sometimes’.” Article-interview by Zoe Heller. Daily Telegraph (U.K.), 3 March 2003, 19. Frothy piece in which Heller recites various factoids of the Mailer legend; it is partially redeemed by Mailer’s comments, given in Brooklyn, on death, karma, and reincarnation. Accompanied by an excerpt from The Spooky Art, 2003.
“To Mailer, a Good Soldier Puts War on Paper.” Article-interview by Bob Minzesheimer. USA Today, 10 April 2003, 7D. Mailer is one of several combat veterans-turned-writers who were interviewed about the literary possibilities of the Iraq War. Mailer, along with Tim O’Brien, James Blinn, Andy McNabb and others are quoted. Mailer’s most interesting comments deal with the many letters he wrote home from the South Pacific during WWII: “Those were my notes for The Naked and the Dead.”
“Our Town.” Interview by Joseph P. Kahn. Boston Globe Magazine “Special Issue, New Perspectives on Cape Cod,” 22 June 2003, 19. Along with Michael Lee, Robert Pinsky, Mary Higgins Clark, Susan Baker, Joel Meyerowitz and a half-dozen others, Mailer talks about the Cape. “All through the war,” he said, “I dreamed of coming of coming back [to Provincetown]. Then to come here, my Lord, it had the feel of 1790.”
“Norman Mailer Gets Moral.” Interview by Tim McCarthy. Life in Provincetown, 14 August 2003, 10–11, 14, 22. Mailer’s comments are evenly divided between his warm memories of Provincetown, where he wrote parts of all but five or six of his books, and his theological views: “We were created in God’s image because we are the infantry of God’s vision.”
=== Secondary ===
 262 pp. Collection of 13 reprinted essays, Bloom’s critical introduction, a Mailer chronology, Mailer bibliography, and index.
 359 pp., indexed.
 Includes Mailer bibliography.
 Includes Mailer bibliography.
== 2004 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Books and Pamphlets ====
Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969. Edited by J. Michael Lennon. Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, August 2004. Dedication: “For Donna, Stephen, Joseph and James. With a special appreciation for the students of English 397, Norman Mailer Seminar, at Wilkes University.” 124 pp., $150. Limited, numbered edition of 110, signed by Mr. Mailer and editor. A compilation of 76 letters to family, friends, literary associates, and admirers concerning the 1964 serial publication in Esquire of Mailer’s fourth novel, its subsequent publication in revised form by Dial Press in 1965, and the 1966 Warner Brothers film version. Contains 14 illustrations (10 in color), four appendices, critical introduction, and index. Advance excerpt of nine letters appeared in Provincetown Arts 19 (summer 2004), 109–13.
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
[Comment on the passing of George Plimpton]. Harvard Advocate 140, no. 2 (winter 2004), 13. Memorial number. Mailer, who acted in “Zelda, Scott and Ernest” with Plimpton and his wife, Norris Church Mailer, at least a dozen times, lauds Plimpton as “the best gentleman most of us ever got to know.”
“Immodest Proposals.” Playboy, January 2004, 90–94, 198, 266, 268, 270, 272. 50th Anniversary Issue. Long essay outlining a platform for the Democrats in the 2004 election, including ideas on corporations, taxes, education, the environment, drug decriminalization, abortion, gay marriage, homeland security, the war in Iraq, and foreign policy.
Preface to The Good, the Bad, and the Dolce Vita: The Adventures of an Actor in Hollywood, Paris, and Rome, by Mickey Knox, 1–5. New York: Nation Books, 1 April 2004. Knox, one of Mailer’s oldest friends, appeared in two of his experimental films in the 1960s, and the 1967 off-Broadway production of Mailer’s play, The Deer Park. Mailer discusses Knox’s brilliant performance in the play, his screen work, his reputation as a lover, and his overseas work as a dialogue coach after being blacklisted during the Red scare of the late 1950s.
“The Election and America’s Future.” New York Review of Books, 4 November 2004, 6–17. Mailer is one of 14 individuals, including Russell Baker, Anthony Lewis, Thomas Powers, and Garry Wills, who contributed to this symposium. His 1200-word contribution, on pp. 13–14, is divided into two parts. The first deals with the spiritual condition of the U.S.A., a “guilty nation” and why 9/11 “was the jackpot” for Pres. Bush and Karl Rove, concluding with advice for John Kerry in the upcoming presidential debates. The second part, written after the first debate, is more optimistic, but ends with the lines: “Perhaps it is no longer Jesus or Allah who oversees our fate but the turn of the Greek gods to take another run around the track. When it comes to destiny, they were the first, after all, to conceive of the Ironies.”
==== Interviews ====
“Norman Mailer on the Media and the Message.” Interview by Margo Hammond. Poynterline 6, February 2004. Crisp discussion of the relationship of journalism and fiction, with comments on Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Tom Wolfe.
“Father to Son: What I’ve Learned about Rage.” By Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. New York, 9 August 2004, 28–35. Cover Story (with editor’s title). In this lengthy conversation between Mailer and his youngest son, the chief topic is the upcoming Republican convention in New York and how protests against it might aid or injure the Democrats. Also considered: the antiVietnam War protests, Sen. McCain, Pres. Bush, Sen. Kerry, Pat Buchanan, and American corporations.
A Certain Grim Pleasure’: Norman Mailer Speaks with Longtime Friend James Toback about Film.” V Life 397 (December 2004–January 2005), 76– 79, 114–15. In a wide-ranging discussion on film and the horrors of modern life, Mailer also explains how the writing process has changed for him over the years: “I used to pride myself on the white heat of my first drafts . . . now it’s not like that. My first drafts are much below the final product.”
=== Secondary ===
 Important essay.
 363 pp., indexed.
 Includes bibliography of novel.
== 2005 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Books and Pamphlets ====
Norman Mailer’s Provincetown: The Wild West of the East. Edited by J. Michael Lennon. Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Arts Press, 2005. 12 pp., $10. Limited edition. Contains five evocations of Mailer’s Provincetown, and Lennon’s introduction.
==== Essays, poems, forewords, prefaces, introductions, symposia contributions, letters to the editor ====
“America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan.” Sunday Times, 23 January 2005. Essay on the narratives offered by the Bush Administration to explain “why we were so obviously hell-bent for war.”
“Sartre’s God Problem.” Nation 280 (6 June 2005), 30, 32. Mailer mixes his praise of Sartre with criticism of his atheism. See next entry.
“God and Man and Mailer.” Letter to the Editor. Nation 280 (15–22 August 2005). Mailer responds to several letters disagreeing with his comments on Sartre in the 6 June 2005 Nation (see above), calling all but one of them, “as ad hominem as mosquitoes.”
==== Interviews ====
“Mailer v. Mailer: Norman Mailer Talks with His Son, John Buffalo Mailer, about the Sport of Boxing.” Stop Smiling No. 20 (early 2005), 38–43, 91. Mailer’s most extended discussion of boxing in an interview.
“Mailer’s Miscellany: Author Sells His Archives to the University of Texas.” Article-interview by Douglas Brinkley. New York Times, 26 April 2005, E1, E7. Mailer answers questions on the scope and organization of his papers, and why they were going to the Harry Ransom Humanities Center of the University of Texas.
“Mailer Gives Archives to Ransom Center.” Article-interview by Yashoda Sampath. Daily Texan, 26 April 2005, 1, 2A. More detail on the Mailer papers.
“Norman Mailer: The Last Buccaneer Looks Back.” Article-interview by Douglas Brinkley. Rolling Stone, Nos. 977/978 (30 June–14 July, 2005), 84–85, 88, 90, 92, 94–95, 162, 166. Retrospective look at Mailer’s career on the occasion of the sale of his papers to the University of Texas.
“Mailer’s Papers Come to Texas.” Article-interview by unidentified author. Ransom News (newsletter of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas) 13 (winter 2005), 1, 8. Mailer explains why he sold the papers to Texas and what they might be used for in the future.
Interview by Sue Fox. Sunday Times Magazine (London), 19 November 2006, 7. Sunday, Features.
=== Secondary ===
 Another account, with some errors, of the sale of the Mailer papers.
== 2006 ==
=== Primary ===
==== Books and Pamphlets ====
The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America. With John Buffalo Mailer. New York: Nation Books, February 2006. Series of conversations between the Mailers, father and son, 218 pp., $14.95. Dedication: “To a lovely lady — Norris Church Mailer.” Soft cover. Some of the conversations in this collection appeared in a different form in various magazines, including New York Times and Stop Smiling (see above).
==== Interviews ====
“A Conversation with Norman Mailer.” Article-interview by Marcia Karp. ALSC Newsletter (publication of the American Association of Scholars and Critics), 12 (winter 2006), 10–11. Excerpts from the keynote event of the 2005 ALSC conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at which J. Michael Lennon interviewed Mailer.
“Still Punching.” Interview with Howard Halle. Time Out New York, 2–8 March, 2006, 160. Mailer talks about the “basic emptiness in the country” on the occasion of the publication of The Big Empty.
“Fallen God of Small Things.” Article-interview by Daniel Swift. Financial Times (London), 15–16 April 2006. In a piece focused on The Big Empty, Mailer also talks about his earlier works and the current American malaise generally.
“Flag-waving U.S. Shows Signs of Totalitarianism.” Interview with Takaaki Misuno. Asahi Shimbun (English language edition, Tokyo), 14 September 2006, 28. Focuses on the threat to democracy created by the War in Iraq, and also contains first notice of the subject of Mailer’s forthcoming novel, The Castle in the Forest.
“Relative Values: Norman Mailer and His Son John.” Interview by Sue Fox. Sunday Times Magazine (London), 19 November 2006, 7, 9, 11. Father and son discuss growing up as a Mailer.
=== Secondary ===
 Includes chapters on Mailer.
 287 pp. Includes Levy’s account of his visit with Mailer in Provincetown, and the mistaken notion that Tim Madden, the hero of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, is gay.
 Memoir of the sister of Mailer’s first wife Beatrice Silverman containing several reminiscences of Mailer in the 1940s and 1950s, including visits to the Silverman home in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
 Compiled by Ben Sisario.
 Mailer’s relations with Styron and James Jones are discussed at length in chapter 21, “Mailer and Others,” based in part on an interview with Mailer.
== References ==
* Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography, accessed via EBSCO Publishing Research Host: http:􏰂􏰂www.ebscohost.com. Extensive listing of books, book articles, journal articles, dissertation abstracts, both English language and foreign language. Some overlap of important works listed herein; excellent source of foreign materials and dissertation abstracts found nowhere else. Generally available via universities and other institutions which subscribe to literary databases.
* Literature Online biography—Norman Mailer
* The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth Century American Short Story: Norman Mailer (1923– ) 
* Encyclopedia of the Novel: Norman Mailer (1923– ) (United States)
== Web Sites ==
* The Norman Mailer Society
* American Masters
* New York State Writers Institute
Category:Bibliographies (MR)