On February 16, the New York Review of Books featured a podcast with ALSC member J. Michael Lennon. Lennon is currently working on an authorized biography of Norman Mailer, who was the guest speaker at the Eleventh Annual ALSC Conference in 2005. In the interview, Lennon discusses Mailer’s fascination with uncovering “new pockets of American reality,” his relationships with other authors as a young man, and his tremendous ambition to write the Great American Novel. Arguably more famous for his two Pulitzer-prize winning works of non-fiction, Mailer insisted that even those were works of fiction, reasoning that “there are no histories; we’re all just making it up.”
The podcast can be accessed for free at http://www.nybooks.com/podcasts.