Category: Norman Mailer

Roundup: Has “Cute Butt,” Laps Up Porn

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Curtis Sittenfeld, Michael Chabon, Norman Mailer, Porter Shreve

Bloomberg News reviews Curtis Sittenfeld‘s American Wife. Why can’t all book reviews get headlines like this?

Jeffrey Goldberg and Michael Chabon nyuk it up about Sarah Palin and Alaska.

Porter Shreve‘s next novel, When the White House Was Ours, is out soon. I’m not expecting greatness, but it’s next on my list, and I’m hopeful. I interviewed Shreve last year about D.C. charter schools, the subject of the book.

The tentpole article in the latest Bookforum, online now, is an essay by Thomas Frank on Norman Mailer and modern-day punditry, but the whole issue looks worth a read.

Editors: Important

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Norman Mailer

“At one point Mailer changes his mistress’s prose from ‘stick that up your English tushy’ to ‘stick that up your Hungarian bottom’. He also recommends that Mallory delete a reference to ‘nibbling his bullets.'” —From a London Times article providing more details about the relationship between Norman Mailer and Carole Mallory, who recently sold her personal papers to Harvard University. Among those papers is a memoir of her affair with Mailer, with Mailer’s handwritten edits.

Doc Doc

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Harold Louis Humes, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen

Doc, a documentary about novelist and Paris Review cofounder Harold Louis Humes, opens in New York this week. The New York Times review is here; the paper’s 2007 feature on the making of the documentary is here.

I haven’t seen the film (directed by his daughter Immy), or read Humes’ two novels, but there are lots of intriguing details in the articles: Peter Matthiessen was apparently a CIA agent using his Paris Review gig as a cover; Humes was Norman Mailer‘s campaign manager during his ill-fated mayoral run; he suffered from mental illness and believed he single-handedly prevented World War III.

As the official site for the film points out, Humes’ two novels–The Underground City and Men Die–have been reissued by Modern Library. (Click here for a trailer.)

News and Notes

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Richard Stern

Ten things that make Cormac McCarthy special

A speculative graphic novel about the war in Iraq, circa 2011

Richard Stern on Norman Mailer:

Yes, this greatly talented man, who could tell you where the grocer bought his suits and what radio programs he listened to, who knew why the Cape Canaveral launchings brought out every motor tinkerer within 500 miles, who knew why Jack Kennedy’s hauling his injured shipmate to safety as he did (teeth gripped on the man’s belt) revealed his ferocity, this brilliant reporter of the world’s stuff, had a depth of innocence he’d grown to dislike almost as much as he disliked and disowned the handsome Jewish boy swaddled in his herringbone suit on the back cover of “The Naked and the Dead.”