Coming November 4: Special Edition: 20 Years of the Review

2026-10-14

For twenty years The Mailer Review has published Mailer scholarship as it happened. On November 4, 2026, the opening day of the Norman Mailer Society’s 23rd annual conference in St. Pete Beach, Florida, the journal marks that anniversary with Volume 16, Special Edition: 20 Years of the Review, a festschrift honoring Phillip Sipiora, who founded the Review and edited its first fifteen volumes.

Rather than a memorial anthology, the volume is an argument: a selection of essays, interviews, and archival work from those fifteen volumes, chosen to show how Mailer studies came of age under Sipiora’s stewardship. J. Michael Lennon’s foreword tells the story of the journal’s founding; guest editor Matthew S. Hinton and series editor Gerald R. Lucas introduce the selection, which is gathered in five sections:

  • Monument to Method: Ideology, Gender, and the Cultural Stakes of Mailer — Maggie McKinley, Enid Stubin, Morris Dickstein
  • Expanding the Archive: Intertexts, Sources, and the Recovery Project — J. Michael Lennon on Hemingway’s letter to Mailer, Robert J. Begiebing on Lipton’s Journal, Michael K. Glenday on Fitzgerald and Mailer
  • Genre, Form, and Method — Jason Mosser, Gerald R. Lucas, Nicole DePolo
  • Mailer in the World: Reception, Pedagogy, and the Classroom — Heather Braun, Raj Chandarlapaty, Barbara Wasserman
  • Voice and Encounter: Interviews and Conversations — Michael Chaiken’s interview with Mailer, Phillip Sipiora in conversation with J. Michael Lennon, and Lawrence Schiller on The Executioner’s Song

Volume 16 will be published here as HTML and PDF, with an EPUB edition of the whole volume. Members of the Norman Mailer Society receive the current volume and its EPUB as part of their membership; join or renew to read it on publication day. Like every volume, it becomes free to all readers one year after publication. Libraries may subscribe through our subscriptions page.

All fifteen of Phillip Sipiora’s volumes are already online in the archive, free to read.