The Mailer Review is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of the life, work, and cultural significance of Norman Mailer. Since its founding, the journal has served as a forum for critical scholarship, archival research, and interpretive engagement with Mailer’s writing and with the literary, political, and cultural contexts in which it emerged.
Published on November 4, 2026, the opening day of the Norman Mailer Society’s conference, Volume 16 of The Mailer Review is a festschrift for founding editor Phillip Sipiora, gathering landmark essays, interviews, and archival finds from the journal’s first fifteen volumes.
Read more about Coming November 4: Special Edition: 20 Years of the Review
The Mailer Review marks twenty years of publication with a special edition honoring its founding editor, Phillip Sipiora. Guest-edited by Matthew S. Hinton with editor Gerald R. Lucas, the volume gathers fourteen essays and interviews from the journal’s first fifteen volumes. They are arranged to show how Mailer studies grew, under Sipiora’s stewardship, “from monument to method.”
A foreword by J. Michael Lennon recounts the journal’s founding. The editors’ introduction, “The Site of Memory,” presents the volume as legacy work: a story worth passing on. Five sections follow. The first takes up ideology, gender, and the cultural stakes of Mailer’s work. The second turns to the archive, with Hemingway’s letter to Mailer, Lipton’s Journal, and Mailer and Fitzgerald. The third covers genre and form, from The Armies of the Night to the early short fiction and MoonFire. The fourth considers Mailer in the classroom and the world, from Long Branch to Afghanistan. The volume closes with interviews: Mailer on his films, Lawrence Schiller on The Executioner’s Song, and Sipiora in conversation with Lennon on the state of Mailer studies.
Contributors include Robert J. Begiebing, Heather Braun, Michael Chaiken, Raj Chandarlapaty, Nicole DePolo, Morris Dickstein, Michael K. Glenday, Gerald R. Lucas, Maggie McKinley, Jason Mosser, Lawrence Schiller, Phillip Sipiora, Enid Stubin, and Barbara Mailer Wasserman.
Cover and interior design by Giles Hoover.
The Mailer Review is published by the Norman Mailer Society, which keeps Mailer’s work in conversation through the journal, an annual conference, and a community of scholars, writers, and readers. Members can read each new volume as soon as it appears and receive its EPUB edition; every volume is free to all one year after publication.
